Freedom Its Meaning

FREEDOM

Its Meaning

FREEDOM

ITS MEANING

l)l? BENEDETTO CROCE • THOMAS MANN
ALFRED N. WHITEHEAD • EDWARD S. CORWIN • PAUL TILLICH
HU SHIH • JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS • ROBERT A. MILLIKAN
FELIX BERNSTEIN * ETIENNE GILSON • EDWIN G. CONKLIN
GEORGE D. BIRKHOFF • FRANK KINGDON * ALVIN JOHNSON
BERTRAND RUSSELL • RALPH BARTON PERRY * JOHN DEWEY
ROBERT M. MACIVER • CHARLES A. BEARD • JOHN M. CLARK
FRANZ BOAS • GAETANO SALVEMINI • LOUIS D. BRANDEIS
ALBERT EINSTEIN • RALPH W. GERARD • HENRY A. WALLACE
WILLIAM LYON PHELPS * J. B. S. HALDANE * JOHN A. RYAN
VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON • P. W. BRIDGMAN • KURT RIEZLER
MAX WERTHEIMER • JOHN MAC MURRAY • JACQUES MARITAIN
CHARLES MORRIS • RAPHAEL DEMOS • HENRI BERGSON
EDGAR S. BRIGHTMAN * WILLIAM PEPPERELL MONTAGUE
JAMES T. SHOTWELL • HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER

PLANNED AND EDITED BY

RUTH NANDA ANSHEN

HARCOURT, BRACE AlWWMPANY V IU NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1940, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

All rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this hook
or portions thereof in any form .

first edition

Designed by Robert Josephy

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC,, RAHWAY, N. J.

Acriores autem morsus sunt intermissae
libertatis quarn retentae.

Freedom sup pressed and again regained
bites with keener fangs than freedom
never endangered »

— Cicero De Officiis ii.7.24.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For important suggestions and criticisms the Editor wishes to
express her deep gratitude to James T. Shotwell, Frederick
J. E. Woodbridge, Felix Bernstein, Herbert W. Schneider,
Robert M. Maclver, Edgar S. Brightman, Max Wertheimer,
Lewis Mumford, Kurt Riezler, Arthur O. Lovejoy, Wm. Pep-
per ell Montague, and William M. Malisoff.

The Editor also wishes to make grateful acknowledgments
for permission to use the following copyright material: to The
Macmillan Company for the use of Professor Whitehead’s con-
tribution from Adventures of Ideas ; to Messrs. Sheed and
Ward for Professor Gilson’s contribution j to the National Edu-
cational Association and the City of Boston for the use of T rue
Americanism by Justice Brandeis, which was first delivered as
an Oration in Faneuil Hall, on July 5, 1915 - y to G. P. Putnam’s
Sons for Professor Dewey’s contribution from Freedom and
Culture ; to Henry Holt and Company for Professor Bergson’s
contribution from Morality and Religion .

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: origin and aim by Ruth Nanda Anshen 3
I. FREEDOM INVADES HISTORY

James T. Shotwell: freedom — its history and

MEANING 1 1

Benedetto Croce: the roots of liberty 24

Alfred North Whitehead: aspects of freedom 42

Thomas Mann: freedom and equality 68

Edward Samuel Corwin: liberty and juridical re-
straint 84

James Truslow Adams: freedom in America 104

Hu Shih: the modernization of china and japan 114

A COMPARATIVE STUDY IN CULTURAL CONFLICT AND A
CONSIDERATION OF FREEDOM

Paul Tillich: freedom in the period of transfor-
mation 123

Felix Bernstein: the balance of progress of free-
dom in history . 145

Etienne Gilson: medieval universalism and its

present value in the concept of freedom 152

ix

X

CONTENTS

2. FREEDOM FOR THE MIND
Robert A. Millikan: science, freedom, and the

WORLD OF TOMORROW 173

Edwin Grant Conklin: intellectual freedom 182

Alvin Johnson: academic freedom 199

Frank Kingdon: freedom for education 206

George D. Birkhojf: intuition, reason, and faith

IN SCIENCE, AND MAN’S FREEDOM 223

FREEDOM IN THE BODY POLITIC

Bertrand Russell: freedom and government 249

Ralph Barton Perry: liberty in a democratic state 265

Robert M. Maclver: the meaning of liberty and

its perversions 278

Charles A. Beard: freedom in political thought 288

John M. Clark: forms of economic liberty and

what makes them important 305

Gaetano Salvemini: democracy reconsidered 329

Louis D. Brandeis: true Americanism 349

CONTENTS Xi

4. CULTURAL PATTERNS FOR FREEDOM

John Dewey: the problem of freedom 359

Franz Boas: liberty among primitive people 375

Albert Einstein: freedom and science 381

Vilhjalmur Stefansson: was liberty invented? 384

Ralph W. Gerard: organic freedom 412

William Lyon Phelps: freedom and literature 428

Henry A. Wallace: the genetic basis for democ-
racy and freedom 437

/. B. S. Haldane: a comparative study of freedom 447

5. THE ESSENCE OF FREEDOM

John A. Ryan: religion as the basis of the postu-
lates of freedom 475

Edgar Sheffield Brightman: freedom, purpose, and

VALUE 48 5

John Macmurray : freedom in the personal nexus 507
P. W. Bridgman: freedom and the individual 525

Kurt Riezler: what is freedom? 538

XU CONTENTS

Max Wertheimer : a story of three days 555

Wm. Pepperell Montague: freedom and nominal-
ism 570

Charles Morris: the mechanism of freedom 579

Raphael Demos: human freedom — positive and

NEGATIVE 590

Henri Bergson: freedom and obligation 61 2

Jacques Maritain: the conquest of freedom 631

EPILOGU E: the liberties of man by Herbert W.

Schneider 653

INDEX 673

PROLOGUE

Ruth Nanda Anshen

ORIGIN AND AIM

M AN alone, during his brief existence on this earth, is
free to examine, to know, to criticize and to create.
In this freedom lies his superiority over the resistless
forces that pervade his outward life. But Man is only Man —
and only free — when he is considered as a being complete, a
totality concerning whom any form of segregation is artificial,
mischievous, and destructive, for to subdivide Man is to execute
him. Nevertheless, the persistent interrelationship of the proc-
esses of the human mind has been, for the most part, so ignored
as to create devouring distortions in the understanding of Man
to the extent that one begins to believe that if there is any faith
left in our seemingly moribund age it clings in sad perversion,
in isolated responsibility, and with curious tenacity to that
ancient tenet: “Blessed is he who shall not reveal what has been
revealed unto him.”

The mutual unintelligibility among most contemporary
thinkers, their apparent inability to communicate the meaning
and purpose of their ideas to those of differing opinions, the
paucity of their knowledge pertaining to the subjects and re-
searches of others, all this has grown to be as profound as it is
ominous for the future of mankind, and the possibility of clari-
fying the confusion and of dissipating the distortions seems to
be desperately remote. The subdivision, specialization, nay,
atomization increasingly characteristic of religious, philosophic,
and scientific ideas, of political events and social movements

3

FREEDOM

4

during the last two centuries, have proved to be an almost im-
placable impediment to an adequate correlation of these very
ideas and movements which, in truth, are in perpetual inter-
play. The postulates, categories, dialectical promptings, fecund
analogies, or decisive doctrines which first appear in one emi-
nent province of human thought may, and frequently do, pene-
trate, through their inevitable divagations, into a diversity of
other realms j and to be cognizant of only one of them is to mis-
understand the character, kinship, logic, and operation of the
entire organism and to obscure and even eclipse the illuminating
interrelations.

Human thoughts and knowledge have never before been so
abundant, so kaleidoscopic, so vast, and yet, at the same time,
never so diffused, so inchoate, so directionless. And human
anxiety and restlessness, the dark loneliness of man amid hostile
forces, exist commensurately. There has been little recognition
of the importance of a synthetic clarification of modern knowl-
edge and of the affinity of ideas, a kind of encyclopedic syn-
thesis, indispensable, if in the future human affairs are to be
handled with any hopeful freshness. We seem to have forgot-
ten that all great changes are preceded by a vigorous intellec-
tual reorganization and that nothing new can be attempted in
collective human thought and action without a reinterpretation
of the fundamental values of mankind. Is there no hope for
Man to live a well-ordered life, to be able to depend upon the
help of his fellow-beings, especially upon those who by their
ideas direct and interpret the course of his existence? And is the
knowledge which Man most requires, namely, the knowledge of
himself, only to be found in terms of Delphian ambiguity or in
erroneous and cruel understanding?

Out of such considerations as these and a concern for the in-
tegrity of the intellectual life, its moral and spiritual meaning,
the plan to bring about a correlation of those contemporary ideas
which are concerned not with sense data and logical universals,
but with the status of values and the bearing of these values on
conduct, had its genesis. Those humanistic thinkers in the vari-
ous branches of scholarly inquiry (and the contributors to this
volume) with whom this plan was discussed seemed to be poign-

RUTH NANDA ANSHEN

5

antly aware o£ the principal ailment of mankind — of the dis-
junction of empirical approach from theory, of methods of ob-
servation from speculative doctrine, and of the grave lacunae
existent in the study of the nature of man. They seemed to know
that values are eternally present, to question how they might be
discovered, to wonder why they are often confused, and to be
anxious to determine in what sense they are present when they
are not recognized.

It was deemed desirable to establish a series of books, each
devoted to the discussion, from diverse and important contem-
porary points of view, of a single, well-defined question, the
object being to make clear, first how much agreement there is,
and on what specific points, pertinent to the question, and to
make, also, as explicit as possible the points of disagreement and
their real grounds. Such volumes (collectively known as the
“Science of Culture Series,” of which Freedom is the first book)
could do much to clarify the present situation with respect to
the questions defined, and such clarification should be an aid
towards eventual agreement. A co-operative effort to accom-
plish this, to exhibit with all possible clarity where representa-
tives of differing schools of opinion agree and precisely where
and precisely why they disagree, and to do this fairly concisely
could, it was hoped, be of some significance and importance.
Just as Diderot and the other humanists of the eighteenth cen-
tury were imbued with a new vision of Man in their encyclo-
pedic integration of knowledge, so the “Science of Culture
Series” will endeavor to synthesize fundamental contemporary
ideas which, by virtue of their dispersion, have been rendered
comparatively ineffectual.

Although such a synthesis could have no judicial or political
power of any kind, it could, perhaps, exert such an influence on
the peoples of the world that no ruling caste could afford to
defy the moral judgment of this “conscience” of humanity, liv-
ing in the thoughts of the thinkers and represented and ex-
pressed by the contributors of this volume.

One of the values of such a correlation of contemporary
knowledge could be the formulation of a cultural directory for
the guidance of mankind, the creation of a systematic circum-

FREEDOM

6

spection compatible with democratic principles, the discernment
of possible alternatives in a social crisis, leading to a genuine
social democracy in which collective intelligence is so highly
developed as to make individuality not only possible but fruit-
fully effective.

The material necessities of existence and the spiritual values
of the contemporary world, which coexist in the same complex
social totality, are functionally dependent upon each other and
must be co-ordinated to assure the stability of our civilization.
This work has been undertaken in the hope that it will be the
corporeal manifestation of the spirit of science and culture pre-
vailing in the conduct of human affairs 5 that it will be a labora-
tory for the discussion of important and earnest contemporary
problems — with an end to direct the thought and action of man-
kind 5 that by gathering in a synthetic crucible knowledge per-
taining to values, it may at least in part bring back into human
society that humanity which has been so rudely eliminated; and
that, finally, it may, in the words of Bergson, help us to think as
men and women of action and to act as men and women of
thought.

The subject of this volume, a problem of unsurpassed and
critical importance for our age, is, happily, one on which most
“intellectuals,” however various their opinions on other mat-
ters, are of one mind. It has two distinct aims: one, a discussion
of the problem of freedom from diverse points of view; the
other, the promulgation of an authoritative or at least broadly
representative synthesis or conspectus of issues and conclusions
pertaining to this subject, as a basis for a program of action.

The passionate concern of the present book is the freedom
of Man, the autonomy of the rational being developing to ripe
maturity and achieving self-fulfillment. The question of free-
dom is one of the fundamental principles of Being, since the
very perception of Being depends upon freedom which is itself
prior to Being. This book is a positive estimation of freedom not
only as embodied in institutions, but also as moral and spiritual
power; it is a consideration of the personal responsibility of

RUTH NANDA ANSHEN

7

Man which the freedom and dignity of choice place upon him
in his every decision. And above all, it is an apotheosis of Rea-
son which, in the final analysis, is the real mark of freedom and
beyond which there is no true unifying force.

If the slumbering consciousness of man can be awakened to a
clear, rational discernment of the value of Freedom and Rea-
son, both so seriously endangered, if Man with his mind and
with his heart can embrace the universal cause of humanity
whose radiant synonym is liberty, if he can know the truth
about freedom and its wisdom, then we may still have some
tremulous hope for society, and some pride in Man’s decision
as to what his destiny will be. For in the words of Pico della
Mirandola, Man is neither earthly nor divine, neither mortal
nor immortal, but has the power to form himself into whatever
shape he may desire as a free former and sculptor of himself.
He can degenerate into the lower things which are brute or can
be regenerated by the very sentence of his soul into the higher
things which are divine. But first he must institute the radical
reform of an order that is one of darkness and peril, assailed by
bewilderment and demonic forces and destructive of human
personality and of true freedom. He must recognize (since
means must be consonant with the ends they are intended to
serve) that the means to be used must be worthy of the splendor
of the end in view and commensurate with the renewal of an
order of society on a truly spiritual basis.

With Promethean fidelity let us fiercely resist a prostrate
submission to Moloch, let us defy the blind evil of Force and
the wanton creed of Militarism; let us worship only that god
attained by the inspiration and insight of our love and respect
for truth, for beauty and for the ideal of perfection, and with
a new intensity and tenderness rekindle a resurrected vision of
mankind.

It is to those men and women who realize that there is now
the gravest need to bring things back to the fertile, changeless
source of truth, to reintegrate that desire for justice and that
nostalgia for communion through which the world can find
some clear, sincere, and basic meaning and purpose, thereby
creating a cultural force of freedom — that unchanging freedom

FREEDOM

8

to which Plato aspired — with power to act in history and come
to the aid of mankind, it is to those who demand freedom with
unremitting insistence, who not only cherish it but who wish to
comprehend it, who seek a modus vivendi compatible with the
dignity of Man, who long to experience the overpowering
beauty of human existence, and who say, “Here stand I, I can
do no other,” that this volume is faithfully dedicated.

Honor to those heroic warriors who have preserved for us
the priceless heritage of freedom and have kept undefiled the
sanctity and divine fire of the essence of Man!

1. FREEDOM INVADES HISTORY

James T. Shotwell

Professor of the History of International Relations , Columbia University

FREEDOM — ITS HISTORY
AND MEANING

O NE evening in December, 1938, there was broadcast one
of the most stirring programs ever listened to at the
firesides of this country. It was a ceremony of rededi-
cation to what has become known as the Bill of Rights in the
American Constitution. A great scientist, a well-known jurist,
and a high dignitary of the Catholic Church spoke eloquently of
the importance of treasuring our heritage of individual freedom
and maintaining its safeguards in the present crisis of world
affairs. Art was invoked to dramatize the scenes of American
history in which the issues of liberty were worked out in its
decisive periods. Hollywood entered upon a new career as it
turned from entertainment to this message of concern for the
fundamental principles which have underlain American democ-
racy.

No American worthy of the name could fail to be moved by
this ceremony. It was a rededication almost in the religious
sense of the word, touched with a sense of a common participa-
tion in a great and elevating political heritage. It carried with
it as well the suggestion of challenge to those who might con-
ceivably attack it from without, or discard it from within, as it
reaffirmed the spirit and purpose of American democracy. But
stirring and effective as it was, it is seriously open to criticism
from the standpoint of history, for it pictured the Bill of Rights
as having been wholly created at the time it was embodied in
the protests of men like Patrick Henry and George Mason of

11

12 FREEDOM

Virginia, to whom the Constitution, in its original form, seemed
to be susceptible of harboring tyranny in the Federal Govern-
ment.

Mason’s protest, however, was the culmination of a long evo-
lution and not the happy improvisation of a single episode. It
was but the application to the government of the nation as a
whole of principles already stated in the constitutions of the
States when they set up their independent governments in the
heart of the Revolution. It was in the Bill of Rights of Virginia
that George Mason and his colleagues first asserted the rights
of the American citizen in terms that influenced sister colonies
in the formation of their statehood. The process had already
begun which James Bryce later pointed out as the unique ele-
ment in the American federal system, namely, that each State
furnished models or suggestions of government to be copied
and applied by other States. The process of co-operative states-
manship was begun in the earliest chapter of American inde-
pendence and nowhere more clearly than in the spread, from
State to State, of this assertion in their constitutions of the
rights of the citizen over against any possible encroachments of
the government.

There was therefore an earlier chapter of our history than
that which the Hollywood ceremony recalled, when the guar-
antee of personal rights was finally embodied in the Constitu-
tion. But behind this chapter lay, in turn, another and longer
history which in a very real sense is also the history of liberty
in the United States. For in the bills of rights set forth by the
newly formed States were to be found words and phrases which
had already been embodied in the Bill of Rights and the earlier
Petition of Right proclaimed against the tyranny of Stuart kings
in England itself. It is true that the American bills of rights
included more than the safeguarding of self-government against
tyranny. In addition to setting up barriers against arbitrary
government it established liberty of opinion and secured tolera-
tion by the bold stroke of dissociating religion from govern-
ment. But in this it built upon the ideas of that English philos-
opher whose pioneering work first grappled with the funda-
mentals of society in terms of the balancing of freedom and

JAMES T. SHOTWELL I 3

rights — John Locke. The pattern of American liberty was,
therefore, drawn for it in the Old World.

This fact is fully as important for us to keep in mind today
as the contribution which our country added to it. For it would
be yielding ground to the chief enemy of personal liberty in the
world today if we were to develop the wholly unjustified myth
that Americans alone forged the armor of their liberty as the
symbol of a unique political capacity on our part. The chief
enemy of liberty is nationalism, the very thing which liberty
itself created when it rescued nations from feudal tyranny or
the overlordship of kings. This process, however, turns upon
itself if a nation attributes its success to some peculiar quality
of its own, some inherent capacity which other nations do not
enjoy; for then it relies upon its native strength to meet all
future exigencies and interprets every new trend of thought or
action as the natural consequence of its racial or national at-
tributes. The first step in the loss of the guarantee of our liberty
would be the growth of an overwhelming pride in the capacity
of America for freedom as something unique among all nations.
No more profound truth was ever uttered by any American
statesman than Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine that democracy at
home could not be safe except in a world of nations to which
the promise of American life meant something worth preserv-
ing, however much less it might mean to some than to ourselves.
Democracy, which is liberty in action, liberty enshrined in insti-
tutional form and vitalized by the public will, is and must al-
ways remain a generous thing and not the narrow self-assertion
of individual achievement. To think of the Bill of Rights as
wholly our own creation not only falsifies history but tends to
endanger the maintenance of those rights by a false sense of
security and a weakening of our strategic position with reference
to our allies in the world of freedom.

But these thoughts carry us still further along the pathway
of history, for it would be merely enlarging our error if we
included only the English background in addition to our own.
It is true that the history of England is by all odds the greatest
element in the American political heritage and that the seals
which the barons affixed to Magna Charta alongside of that of

FREEDOM

* 4

their reluctant king are the antecedents of the seals of our own
governments. It is also true that beyond Magna Charta we
reach out to those inestimable guarantees that lie in the Com-
mon Law of England. But while the English people, owing
to the security of their country against foreign war, led Europe
in the great drama of political evolution, the fundamental prin-
ciples which the English worked out in courts of law and Par-
liament were also the ideal, and in varying degrees the achieve-
ments, of other peoples. It was in Holland, not in England,
that religious tolerance first found recognition; and it was
Switzerland, defying external tyranny behind the bulwark of the
Alps, that became an asylum and refuge for Central Europe. In
France too, though at a later date, the spirit of liberty spoke in
more vibrant tones than anywhere else in the Old World. And
when the nineteenth century set about the task of building na-
tional states, it was not from any one of these but from the inter-
play of all that political progress registered a common regard
not only for the opinion of mankind but for the rights of the
individual over against the growth of government.

It was in this setting that the American Revolution made one
direct contribution to liberty in Europe; for the bills of rights
in the American constitutions were translated into French to
give practical expression to the declaration of the Rights of
Man and the citizen. Unfortunately for the world today, the
unification of Germany and of Italy was delayed, so that it was
achieved in a period of reaction after the blighting influence of
the era of Metternich. It was not Mazzini, the prophet, nor
Garibaldi, the knight errant of democracy, who united Italy,
but Cavour who, at heart a liberal, used the rival forces of reac-
tion — Napoleon III and Francis Joseph — one against the other.
In Germany the first serious step towards Nazi despotism was
taken when Bismarck beat down the institution of representative
government as a means for upbuilding the German nation and
substituted for it the policy of blood and iron. The principles
of liberty east of the Rhine took refuge in the world of the in-
tellectual, who, lacking achievement in the world of affairs,
became confused and uncertain and yielded to the delusive
blandishments of paternalism.

JAMES T, SHOTWELL I 5

Even from this brief reminder of the history of liberty in
other countries, it should be clear to us that we are not alone
in the appreciation of its blessings. What it shows is not that
certain people are incapable of developing the institutions which
safeguard personal liberty but that they must have the oppor-
tunity to school themselves in its use so that it can be made as
effective in action as the forces arrayed against it. For this na-
tions need to be relatively free from war and the threat of it.
Eastern Europe through all the centuries has been a frontier
region. From the days of the early migrations of Goths, Huns,
and Slavs, military overlords kept watch and ward over the
eastern marches of the Teutonic world. Even in Martin Luther’s
day the chief preoccupation of the Hapsburg was not a theo-
logical dispute but the invasion of the Turk who, at that early
time, was breaching the walls of Vienna. Under these conditions
government was carried on by the bureaucratic agents of Haps-
burg and Hohenzollern as far as their protecting armies could
hold the line of Europe against Asia. Life was regimented to
make it secure, and government was conceived and accepted in
terms of power. Therefore, the contrast between Central Eu-
rope and Western Europe today is one of political education,
and is due to the varying circumstances of their past history
rather than to any native quality that supplies the democratic
peoples with inherent political capacity.

The conclusion to be drawn from this short survey of modern
history is that to safeguard freedom we have to do something
very different from merely reciting a ritual. Freedom lives and
prospers only where society itself is confident of its stability $
and that, in turn, can only be found where there is adequate
provision for both foreign and domestic peace. This leads us
in two directions j on the one hand, to the consideration of
national security and, on the other, to that of social, economic,
and political justice.

As I have pointed out on other occasions, there has never
been an adequate scientific treatment of the subject of national
security. It may be that at this very time some student of the
fundamentals that underlie war and peace is working on the
problem of the security of nations with the clarity of wisdom

FREEDOM

16

and breadth of scholarship which Adam Smith" put into his
Wealth of Nations . There are whole libraries on armament and
disarmament and on the nature of war in the world todays but
no one has pointed out how the situation of one nation differs
from that of another in the application of these techniques,
especially where they are combined with the related and in-
separable question of policies of power.

The conditions of security are twofold; natural and artificial.
Nations are safe from external attack in so far as they keep the
enemy at a distance. This means that in the natural world the
obstacles that lie in the path of an enemy’s advance are the
prime measure of safety. Throughout past centuries the seas
encircling Britain were almost as great defenses for its peace
and security as the oceans are today for the United States.
Mountains, rivers, marshes, and deserts rank high among the
natural strategic frontiers ; and where the greatest of these lie
there is the least need for armaments; but where they are lack-
ing, forts or trenches, guns and garrisons, must be their arti-
ficial substitutes so long as there is any danger on that frontier.
Wherever war is recognized as the instrument of policy, arma-
ments must be invoked as the instruments of security; and in
proportion as that is the case the institutions of freedom have
little chance to grow; because strategy, to be effective, cannot
be called in question or debate in the hour of action. On the
contrary, it must school the citizenry to obedience to hierarchi-
cal control. In proportion, therefore, as the war system per-
vades the civilized world, freedom is curtailed and the chances
for its development are slight indeed.

If national security depended wholly upon this mechanism
of defense there would be little chance for the endurance of
democracy, for, as I have said above, democracy is freedom in
action. But there is another aspect of security which, fortunately,
can be well illustrated in the history of the United States. We
have not only supreme natural security, east and west, because
of the distances which separate us from Europe and Asia, but
we have created another kind of defense, an artificial one, north
and south.

The War of 1812 settled none of the issues for which it was

JAMES T. SHOTWELL 1 7

fought 5 but, after it was over, an agreement was made never
to have armaments again on the Great Lakes — an agreement
which was destined to become the symbol of an unarmed fron-
tier between two friendly nations. The symbol by itself would
undoubtedly have had little meaning if it had not been rein-
forced by policies of arbitration and pacific settlement of inter-
national disputes, so that when the redcoats marched down
from the citadel of Quebec, in the years following the Civil
War, there was no thought of ever replacing them. Disarma-
ment on the northern frontier was made a reality by the policies
of peace of two nations growing in mutual respect and under-
standing.

Although the fact is far less known to us, the frontier on the
south, that with Mexico, has a history almost exactly parallel.
In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which followed the War
of 1848 with Mexico, we agreed that future disputes should be
settled only by recourse to arbitration. This is an even more
definite and formal agreement than we have with Great Britain.
In the latter case, true to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, we have
an unwritten understanding — an entente, to give it its technical
term — which holds our policies away from any thought of war.
But in the case of Mexico, we have pledged our honor, along
with that of Mexico, to seek justice rather than to apply force.
Let me say, in passing, that it is of great importance for us to
remind ourselves of this obligation in the critical period through
which we are now passing. In 1927, the newspapers of this
country reminded us of this obligation at a time when relations
between the two countries were severely strained. Fortunately,
the government of the United States today needs no such re-
minder. The policy of the good neighbor extends the defenses
of the United States far beyond the Rio Grande.

So we match the security supplied us by nature on the east
and west of the United States by a political security on the north
and south. It might seem, therefore, that our national safety
was absolute 5 but science not only lessens distances, and so re-
duces the oceans in size, it also makes nations interdependent
as they have never been in the past. And the growth of a great
military power endangering peace in any part of the world

FREEDOM

18

affects our prosperity and disturbs our economic equilibrium by
the maladjustments which it creates. It therefore unsettles the
minds of the citizens and opens the door to the demagogues.

This brings us to the second part of our problem, the prob-
lem of justice. No nation can be wholly secure, the freedom
of the citizen can never be wholly guaranteed, unless justice is
the guiding principle of policy and the foundation of our insti-
tutions, both in domestic affairs and in dealing with other na-
tions. It is here that the demagogue stirs resentments into hos-
tilities and in the name of liberty endangers its very bases.

Never has this danger been greater than at the present
time. We have already seen more than half the nations of
Europe resigning their liberties into the hands of those who
have capitalized their grievances for an assault upon the in-
stitutions of democracy. And here, in our own land, there are
voices today which speak with eloquent appeal the poisonous
gospel of suspicion, hatred, and intolerance, proclaiming all
the time their deep concern lest the liberties of American
citizens be stolen away by others.

There is especially one who sullies the name of Christian
priest by the unchristian animus of his attack and the spleen of
his innuendoes against millions of his fellow-citizens to whom
the United States had become the harbor of refuge from perse-
cution in other lands. The spread of such doctrines as this man
sets forth upon the air would be like a devastating army of
occupation on the spirit of America if it were to find lasting
lodgment there. The pathway of his ideas leads towards the
most dreadful of all despotisms, that in which the victims them-
selves strangle their own liberties in the mistaken belief that
the demagogues are rescuing them from the social and eco-
nomic evils which are present in the world today. If these
preachers could mobilize the discontent into forces of construc-
tive statesmanship and build firmer foundations for the institu-
tion designed to protect the inherent rights of life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness} if their aspirations were as solid as
their attack is vindictive, there would be no need for apprehen-
sion. But the fundamental principle of freedom is magnanimity.

JAMES T. SHOTWELL 1 9

It cannot build the structure of its desire if the eye of the archi-
tect is distorted by hatred and envy. Only the generous are free
- in spirit 3 and this is true of nations as well as of individuals.
Generosity, of course, can be carried to extremes $ it becomes
a source of weakness if our concern about others reaches the
point where we neglect to think of our own legitimate interests.
Altruism is a noble sentiment but no lasting social order has
ever been built upon it alone. To strike the equilibrium between
our own rights and those of our neighbors is the fundamental
problem of statesmanship. It follows from this that the main-
tenance of our liberties lies in so maintaining the balance be-
tween ourselves and others as to weaken and destroy the appeal
of the demagogue. This cannot be done by attempting to out-
rival him in vituperative attack. It cannot be done by stirring
up against him similar, but opposing, passions; for ignorance
and prejudice provide a stronger arsenal in such a conflict than
reason and intelligence. The path which reason must take to
make liberty secure is that which leads toward fair dealing and
social justice.

The conclusion may seem an obvious commonplace, but, if so,
it is widely ignored in the United States today. The act of Con-
gress in strengthening, instead of disowning, the inquisition of
the Dies Committee against subversive doctrines sets going in
the minds of citizens the very kind of suspicion upon which the
demagogue can build. If we are to proceed along this line, it
will not be Congress that will reap the reward of repression,
but those to whom the repression of other ways of thinking
than their own gives sadistic and unholy pleasure. There were
the makings of revolution in the leadership of Huey Long, but
I doubt if his championship of the proletariat held any more
latent dangers for the Republic than the attitude of mind which
led a conservative writer to refer to his assassination as “a happy
pistol shot.” There was at least a more genial sense of the
foibles of our common humanity in the champion of the poor
whites of the South than there is in his malevolent rival and
successor, Father Coughlin. The attempt to put down un-
American thinking by measures of police, to which the activities

20

FREEDOM

of the Dies Committee naturally lead, is not only to endanger
the habit of freedom of thought and expression, it is to give
aid and comfort to those who would spread the despotism of
hatred over the land.

The real answer to the doctrinaire, whether he be communist,
fascist, or one who masquerades under the guise of democracy,
is to redress the conditions which give his teaching its appeal.
In other words, the maintenance of our own liberties depends
upon a quickened conscience as to our duties. Unfortunately,
this formula does not say all that it should to us. Duty is an
abstraction rather than a catalogue of things, to do. That “Stern
Daughter of the Voice of God 55 is mostly listened to as the
prompter for doing immemorial tasks. It speaks for habit more
than for reason. This was all right as long as habit was reason-
able 5 and throughout the long past, in which the conditions of
life repeated themselves generation after generation and cen-
tury after century, the wisdom of the fathers was a ready guide
for the present. But with the coming of modern science these
conditions are in eternal flux. Invention and discovery bring
increasing change with the increase in control of time and space,
and the ever shifting nature of the day’s work. The perform-
ance of one’s duty to society, upon which rests the opportunities
for freedom, is therefore no longer the unquestioned acceptance
of routine either in economic relations or in government itself.
The only safety for the Republic, the only guarantee for our
individual liberties from now on to the end of time, lie in the
constant, if conservative, criticism of the institutions, as well as
the habits, which we have inherited from the past. If we cannot
resolve this problem so as to satisfy the inmost needs of our
fellow-citizens, our liberties either will be lost in the riot of
anarchy or suppressed by the tyranny of the demagogue.

Never in all the history of civilization was there such a
challenge to the most precious possessions of the spirit of man.
The chief problem of today is not the creation of a vast military
empire in Asia, or Nazi or Fascist developments in Europe 5
it is the adjustment of man to the machine. From untold mil-
lennia before the Ice Age down to yesterday, man made his
way in the world with strength of body rather than by the subtle

21

JAMES T. SHOTWELL

processes of thought. The claw which he inherited from his pre-
hensile ancestors became a marvelously accurate instrument for
mastering the crude forces of nature 5 but now, just in our time,
we are turning into a new era which has only just begun but
will never end — the era in which we must think our way
through rather than grapple with nature by animal strength.
The prime duty, therefore, of the citizen of today is to direct
his own life and that of society in terms of their innermost need,
as that need shifts with the advances made in the arts and sci-
ences in the different corners of the world. Inventions are, by
their nature, of world-wide application, and the nation that
attempts to cut itself off from the progress of science will be
ruined by it. Therefore, merely to stand upon the sacred insti-
tutions of the past is to create a maladjustment with the present,
the kind of maladjustment which breeds blind discontent. The
institutions of government, as well as those of economic and
social life, must henceforth be conceived in increasingly dynamic
terms. It is not enough for freedom to broaden out “from
precedent to precedent,” if each advance is forced upon it from
without. It must take its stand on the basis of social justice and
see to it that there is an adequate instrumentality for making
that justice effective.

The ultimate embodiment of freedom, therefore, is to be
found in institutions which balance the things we need against
the needs of others. Freedom is clearly not what it seems to be,
the attribute of the individual. It is a social, economic, and
political fact and is another name for the equilibrium we call
justice. The reason that this has not been seen is that justice
has been chiefly thought of as having to do with commodities
that pass from hand to hand or with the policing of society.
But there is another commodity more precious than all the rest,
and that is our thought and action. It is never wholly our own,
for it builds upon the thoughts and acts of others and in turn
affects them. Freedom is the condition under which this most
intimate and yet most interdependent thing can find its happiest
and fullest expression. That is why it is a problem for govern-
ments; it is also why the problem remains unsolved, because
no matter how much the individual may try to remain aloof

22

FREEDOM

from the currents of his time, society* as the repository of the
energies of thought and action* forever shifts its ground. The
conclusion is that liberty will increase in proportion as society
learns to make intelligence the guide to conduct.

How this would have shocked Thoreau to speak of freedom
in terms of obligation and not of escape! What of that vision
of the poets which enthrones freedom on lonely mountaintops
or listens for its voice upon the trackless sea? Are we not losing
trace of her footsteps when we would seek for her in the market
place or in the halls of justice? If reason builds the abiding
home of freedom in the heart of society, instinct would seem
to place it where man is alone with nature. As such, it is a thing
of dreams, a symbol of that inner calm whose voice is silence
and whose vision is the stars. To all of us there comes at times
the far sweep of such experiences and, in our daily life, there
is always the plaintive note of memories that speak of our
nostalgia for such unutterable peace as we have found at times
in the strength of the hills and the brooding comradeship of
the woods.

It was from a background of such communion with nature
that Jean Jacques Rousseau startled the complacent, formal
society of eighteenth-century France with the ringing words of
the Social Contract , “Men are born free and are everywhere in
chains.” But in spite of all his cult of a return to nature, he
sought to recover liberty by a search for the lost title deeds of
society; while Thoreau’s Walden was but an episode em-
broidered on the many-colored texture of society. Freedom has
to come where busy men and women work to live; unless it
can illumine the steady measure of their days it remains a thing
apart and not that constant attribute of life which in its perfec-
tion it should be.

The history of liberty even in its earliest form was that of
emancipation. In the Mediterranean basin this came with the
growth of the merchant class and the need for incorporating
it within the body politic. The revolution which accomplished
this in -Greece under Solon and Cleisthenes, in Rome under
the kings and on down through the Republic, was paral-
leled north of the Alps and especially in Britain by the break-

JAMES T. SHOTWELL 23

ing of the blood tie in the great migrations of the Teutons and
the Norsemen. The town meeting of settlers in a little com-
munity became the symbol of political rights and the repository
of freedom. We cannot trace this evolution farther. But it
rounds out, from the dim horizons of prehistoric times, the
theme which we have followed through the problems of today.
Free men are those who face and fulfill the duty of citizens.

There is a noble phrasing of this in terms of religion in the
English Prayer Book, one which marks the dividing line from
that most tyrannous of all servitudes, superstition, by recalling
the dignity of man in relation to things divine. It is that which
conceives of the Deity as one “whose service is perfect free-
dom. 55 It was, we suppose, penned by Thomas Cranmer, for it
occurs in the first form of the Prayer Book in 1549. But it was
the rephrasing in modern terms of that still more daring para-
dox which already for a thousand years had been chanted in
the Gelasian Sacramentary, “Cut servire regrnre est” (“To
serve whom is to reign 55 ). From the concept of power to that
of freedom was a vast and fateful step, one for which the world
was not yet ready in Cranmer’s time. It is a poignant commen-
tary upon pioneering in the realm of thought that the hand
which wrote the English text was the one which a few years
later was burned in the fire of persecution. The thought of
Cranmer remains, however, a living challenge to those who,
in the name of truth, would rob it of that freedom to explore
the mysteries of life and the world by which alone truth can be
found.

If freedom within the body politic rests upon the develop-
ment of social justice it also opens to the individual the untram-
meled spaces in which the mind can range at will, the world
of creative thinking, by the exercise of which comes mastery.
Therefore the heritage of freedom is the opportunity of the
future, if we but keep our trust inviolate.

Benedetto Croce

Senator of the Kingdom, of Italy; Minister of Public Instruction

THE ROOTS OF LIBERTY 1

E VERYBODY can see, everybody admits, that in the
period since the beginning of the Great War the love of
freedom has sensibly weakened throughout the world,
while the idea of freedom has progressively lost its clarity. Lib-
eral systems that were once regarded as solidly established have
collapsed in many countries, and everywhere and in general
liberal convictions have been shaken, liberal enthusiasms have
cooled, people have grown lukewarm toward an ideal of free-
dom that has ceased to fill hearts, inspire conduct, and give
direction to outlooks on the future.

It should nevertheless be apparent to everybody that this so-
called decadence of the liberal idea, or, as others say, this crisis
that at present confronts it, is a strange sort of decadence, a
strange sort of crisis, in that it is illumined by no flash of a new
ideal that is to subsume, replace, outmode the old, in that no
new order is put forward to replace the order that is being at-
tacked or overthrown. The liberal ideal is a moral ideal, ex-
pressing an aspiration toward a better humanity and a higher
civilization. The new ideal that is to triumph should, therefore,
present itself with promise of a newer, richer, deeper humanity
and civilization.

Now the one alternative to freedom that is being practically
suggested in our day cannot be regarded as offering any such

1 Translated from the Italian by Arthur Livingston, Professor of Romance
Languages, Columbia University.

24

BENEDETTO CROCE

2 5

promise. It is the alternative of violence, and violence, in what-
ever name it be exercised, whether of race or country or pro-
letariat, can have no status as morality. Violence contains within
itself none of those energies that enhance civilized human liv-
ing. It is capable at best of expanding in a very problematical
future the physical living of a few individuals, while narrowing
the physical living of all others. Violence may punch to the
floor and silence a person, for instance, who is trying to solve
a problem in mathematics, but no one will claim that the silence
thus brutally obtained will provide the solution for the mathe-
matical problem. All we shall have will be a man on the floor
and a problem' still pending — it will pend till some mathema-
tician is allowed to speak and solve it.

Hence the barrenness in terms of thought, science, art, civic
virtues, human relations, that systems based on violence — or on
what amounts to the same thing, on authority — commonly
show. Everything sound and productive that still survives or
flourishes in them in the directions mentioned, survives and
flourishes either through the survival of free minds or through
the persistence of acquired habits. But these latter gradually
weaken for lack of sustenance and replenishment and through
the passing of the human beings who possess them. Meanwhile
none of the new formulas or ideals is allowed to defend itself
in orderly discussion, to justify itself by critically tested argu-
ments, by interpretations of history, in a word by perspicacious,
cautious, sober research. It is forced to drone its arid mechanical
assertions over and over again, without variations, without
proofs, without elaborations, deriving such animation as it can
from an accompaniment of threats. There is talking in plenty,
there is much brandishing of clubs and swords ; but while scorn
and ridicule are heaped upon it, the ideal of freedom stands
substantially intact and intangible, since it can be overthrown
and replaced only by a better and sounder ideal — and such an
ideal cannot even be conceived.

Our experience of the present world, therefore, can lead only
to one conclusion: that the so-called crisis of liberalism is not
the crisis of any particular ideal — as, for instance, of the ancient
polis as compared with imperial forms of government, or of

26 FREEDOM

feudalism as compared with absolute monarchy, or of absolute
as compared with constitutional monarchy, and so on; but a
crisis of the ideal itself. It is a bewilderment, a degeneration, a
corruption, a perversion, of the moral sense, of that moral en-
thusiasm which ennobles the individual life and glorifies the
history of humanity, marking the latter off into its great
periods.

How this degeneration has come about is made clear enough
by history, and the history more particularly of the period fol-
lowing 1870, when the policies, the pronouncements, and the
whole spirit of Bismarck combined with the theories and the
influence of Marxian socialism to discredit the ideal of freedom,
and the lives of the peoples turned in predominantly economic
and material directions, though liberal constitutions were kept
and in fact proved very serviceable to the new materialism.

This historical development, which has not yet ended and in
fact is probably in its most acute stage, I have examined else-
where, and from the point of view just mentioned; but if I
were to summarize its significance in a single sentence I might
say that it lies in the anguish and the travail incident to the
growth of a new religious faith, and to the quest for such a
faith on the part of humanity or at least on the part of the civ-
ilized peoples. The old religions have worn out before the re-
ligion of freedom has spread widely enough abroad and taken
a sufficiently firm hold. Not only has the religion of freedom
failed to translate itself into conviction and accepted opinion in
the masses — clothing, itself meantime in more or less of a myth,
as inevitably happens. Even among the educated the religion of
freedom has not attained such a solid theoretical elaboration as
to render it impregnable to attacks frontal or treacherous.

But we should not lose heart on that account, we should not
give way to pessimism— pessimism is by definition incoherent
and profitless. We have no reason despondently to resign our-
selves to a new aeon-long era of barbarism such as a number
of apocalyptic writers of our day foresee and foretell— such fan-
cies, like all structures of the imagination, have their empty pos-
sibility, they have no certainty whatever.

We should not lose heart in the first place because it is the

BENEDETTO CROCE

27

lot and the duty of man to work on and fight on. But then again
human society has lived through other periods when moral sen-
timents have waned and materialisms have waxed triumphant,
and in every such case it has recovered through a spontaneous
rekindling of enthusiasm and idealism, through an ever reblos-
soming spiritual exuberance, through the words and the exam-
ples of apostles aflame with the religious spirit who sooner or
later have recaptured the ears of men. As regards our scholars
and thinkers of the present time, it is their task to keep the con-
cept of freedom precise and clear, to broaden it and work out
its philosophical foundations. That is the contribution that may
properly be required of us in the many-sided struggle that is
laid upon us to resurrect the ideal and restore life under free-
dom.

There are those who smile at this sort of contribution and
doubt its necessity and its utility. The tree of theory, we are
told in the words of the poet, is gray, while the tree of life is
green. We are told that ideas and arguments do not create the
passion or the flaming resolve that alone counts in practice. But
the notion that thought and action are separate things, that they
are indifferent to each other and without influence upon each
other, is a hasty judgment based upon superficial observation.
In the living and concrete spiritual act the two terms stand per-
fectly united. The act of thought is at the same time an act of
willing, since it derives from nothing less than a moral urge,
from the torment, the pain, the necessity, of removing an im-
pediment to the flow of life; and it eventuates in nothing else
than a new disposition of will, a new attitude and demeanor,
a new manner of acting in the practical field. A thinker who
does not suffer his problem, who does not live his thought, is
not a thinker; he is a mere elocutionist, repeating thoughts that
have been thought by others. Rarely enough, to be sure, has the
thinker also been the statesman, the warrior, or the leader of
parties or peoples; but that fact depends on the specification of
human activities, each of which, for that matter, evolves in its
particular sphere but with an outlook upon life as a whole.
Within its sphere, the labor of speculation does not stand cut
off from life; rather it gathers there the energy that it requires

FREEDOM

28

for functioning in the world at large ; and it so functions not
merely by communicating the logical processes involved in it to
those who accept it, rethink it in compendious form, and make
it their own, but also and very particularly through the fact
that in many people conclusions that are products of the think-
er’s labor are transmuted into axioms, commonplaces, proverbs
and, stripped of the proofs that justify them, become articles of
faith and trusted guides of conduct.

So the educated and the so-called ruling classes are formed.
Without such classes no human society has ever been able to
endure and their strength is the strength of society as a whole.
There is, to be sure, a class now large, now very large, that
lives on from day to day indifferent to moral questions and to
problems of public life, devoting neither thought nor attention
to them and speaking, when it speaks, only to voice its satisfac-
tions or dissatisfactions in respect of its needs and comforts.
Such are the so-called “masses,” to whom a demagogic roman-
ticism ascribes mysterious and mystical virtues and pays a wor-
ship corresponding. The potency of ideas being at its minimum
among the uneducated, it is certainly not to be expected that the
truths that are discovered by thinkers and become part of the
common patrimony of civilization should be easily carried down
to the masses. But we must nevertheless do our best to educate
them, and enable them on the one hand to replenish the ruling
classes with fresh forces, new workers, new members 5 and on
the other to bring themselves progressively into harmonious
accord with the educated. Whenever and wherever this is not
possible the masses must be handled with the political wisdom
that the special case requires, in order to prevent them from
ruining the conquests that society has made — in 'other words,
from ruining civilization. Civilization has been ruined a num-
ber of times in the course of history, but always, sooner or later,
now with more, now with less difficulty, the dismantled dikes
have been repaired and the stream has resumed its regular flow.

For a full and clear discussion of the philosophical theory of
freedom, three aspects, or levels, had better be kept distinct.

Under the first aspect, freedom may be regarded as the force
that creates history — indeed this is so truly its real and proper

BENEDETTO CROCE 29

function that one might say, in a sense somewhat different from
the Hegelian, that history is the history of freedom. In fact,
everything the human being does or creates is done or created
freely — actions, political institutions, religious conceptions, sci-
entific theories, the productions of poetry and art, technical in-
ventions, instruments for increasing wealth and power. Illiberal
systems, as just indicated, are barren. Their counterfeit achieve-
ments have the traits of the so-called imitations, or artificial re-
workings, of poetry and art, which retrace through more or less
grotesque or repulsive recombinations poems or paintings that
already exist, and which, devoid as they are of anything truly
new or original and therefore devoid of esthetic reality, are
thrust aside and ignored by the critic or the historian. So in
civic history all those things that are done under constraint,
even though they may help to some extent to meet individual
needs of patronage, livelihood, or comfort, belong to physio-
logical living and not to the moral or civic living which they
fraudulently ape. Periods of suppressed or oppressed liberty
contribute to the general productivity of history only in so far
as the suppression or oppression cannot be and never is absolute
and complete, since the very violence of the oppression pro-
vokes multifarious reactions in an opposite direction. On the one
hand, therefore, we often see oppressors inclined to favor or
promote labors of freedom, not because they like the freedom,
indeed the reverse, but because they come to see that for the
particular social or political systems that they have instituted,
whatever these may be, they need certain services and certain
kinds of support. They cannot, for instance, dispense with doc-
tors, engineers, scientists, or writers 5 and, soon discovering that
such experts cannot be produced by mechanical processes, they
find themselves obliged to leave them more or less free in their
training and in the prosecution of their work. On the other
hand we always observe efforts and activities on the part of an
opposition, now overt and talkative, now secret and silent, but
which are never lacking and which to some extent fertilize the
barren present and attenuate its despair by planting seeds for a
more or less immanent future. If human affairs did not develop
in this manner, ages of oppression would be altogether sterile —

FREEDOM

30

they would be periods of death and not of life, or at least of no
civilized living — they would represent vacuums in the historical
process. Such a thing is unthinkable and that it does not take
place is evidenced by the little or much that ages which for one
reason or another are considered ages of oppression have never-
theless produced, and even more emphatically by the joyous
resilience which spreads abroad in the succeeding ages, which
must therefore have been prepared for by the earlier and so
after a fashion have existed in them.

The historian looks at things and judges them otherwise than
people who are in the thick of the fight and feel all its passions,
whether these be the oppressors who gloatingly imagine they
have stamped out liberty or the oppressed who mourn liberty
as dead and would fain resurrect her. The historian knows that
the issue in the struggle is never whether freedom shall live or
die— freedom, after all, being naught else but humanity, a hu-
manity that is at war with itself. He knows that the question,
always is of a more or a less, of a more rapid rhythm or a
slower rhythm, and that the contrasting beliefs just mentioned
are illusions, mistaken impressions, reflecting the share which
the opponents of freedom and the lovers of freedom severally
have in the struggle.

Under its second aspect, on its second level, freedom is
thought of not as the force that creates history but as a prac-
tical ideal which aims to create the greatest possible freedom in
human society and therefore to overthrow tyrannies and op-
pressors and establish institutions, laws, ethical systems, that
will successfully uphold it. If one plumbs this ideal to the bot-
tom one finds it in no sense different or distinguishable from
conscience and moral behavior, and one observes that the will
to freedom as conscience expresses the sum and the synthesis of
all the moral virtues and of all the definitions which have been
given of ethics. However variously these may describe the
moral ideal— placing it now in respect for one’s neighbor, now
in the general welfare, now in an enhancement of the spiritual
life, now in a striving for a better and better world, and so on —
they all agree on one thing: on a resolve that freedom shall
triumph over the obstacles that rise in its path and over the

BENEDETTO CROCE

3 1

aversions that beset it, and give full expression to its life-creat-
ing power. When we go to the rescue of a person who is ill and
quiet or lessen his pain, we are striving, in effect, to restore a
source of activity, in other words a source of freedom, to so-
ciety. When we educate a child, we aim to make of him a per-
son able to go his own way as a free autonomous being. When
we defend the just against the unjust, the true against the false,
we do so because the unjust and the false represent servitude to
passion and to mental inertia, whereas the true and the just are
acts of freedom.

Altogether inappropriate, therefore, is the fear, nay the ter-
ror, that some people manifest when it is proposed to foster or
recognize the full and unlimited freedom of the human being.
Their thoughts turn at once to the abuses that the wicked, the
criminal, the insane, the young and inexperienced, may make of
unlimited freedom — as though to control or to help those sorts
of people there were no moral judgments* and condemnations
on the part of society, no penal sanctions, sanatoria, asylums,
schools, and the like, on the part of the State. They ignore or
pretend to ignore the fact that when we speak of the need of
freedom we are thinking strictly and exclusively of ways of
facilitating the activities of people who are neither wicked nor
criminal nor insane nor inexperienced and immature, and not of
ways of facilitating the excesses of people who are subject in
one way or another to bestial unrestraint, madness, childishness,
ignorance, or the like. It should be clear that only with the
former in mind do we assert that all obstacles that are set in
the way of free activity are harmful to human society.

Since, as we have seen, the liberal ideal is one and the same
with conscience, that ideal in one form or another and to a
greater or lesser degree exerts its influence in all ages and can-
not therefore be regarded as a historical phenomenon that ap-
pears at a certain moment, endures for a certain length of time
and then, like all historical phenomena, wanes and disappears.
It is of course true that, as we commonly say, the liberal ideal
is a product of modern times, that it had its beginnings in the
seventeenth century and reached its full blossoming in the first
half of the nineteenth. In strict exactness, however, we could

FREEDOM

32

not say that the sense of freedom or the ideal of liberty orig-
inated and developed during that period or any other particular
period. What we should say is that during that period people
became strongly and growingly conscious of the essential char-
acter of freedom and of its status as a supreme principle. That
perception had not been so easy in earlier periods, because of
the prevalence of transcendental conceptions, and the strings of
commandments and prohibitions ordained on high which went
with transcendental systems and were upheld against dissenters
by punishments and persecutions, now of Protestants by Cath-
olics, now of Catholics by Protestants, and so on.

But with the end of the religious wars and the advent of re-
ligious tolerance people began to see the importance of not sup-
pressing unpopular ideas but of meeting them with opposite
ideas. This liberty gradually brought all other liberties in its
train, till the principle that underlay and upheld them all was
finally perceived in its completeness. Thus a higher, more com-
prehensive ideal made its way to triumph, breaking through be-
liefs in the transcendental, subsuming, replacing them, warm-
ing, enlightening, reshaping the soul of the modern man, which
is a very different soul from the soul of the medieval or an-
cient man.

This was a movement of moral liberation and of moral as-
cension. To imagine, after the fashion of the economic-inter-
pretationists and their imitators, that it can be explained by the
simultaneous rise of an economic social class, the bourgeoisie ,
and the rise of capitalism, industry, and free commercial com-
petition, in other words to regard it as an economic phenome-
non, is to misunderstand it altogether. Nor, really, are we any
better served by attempts, such as have been made, to explain
it as a strictly psychological derivation from a Calvinistic con-
cept of vocation or mission.

This deliberate, self-conscious aspiration for freedom as a
supreme and fundamental good exerted a tremendous influence
upon the generations of men who witnessed and provoked 1830,
1848, and i860. In those days, and indeed long afterwards, it
seemed to be a permanent acquisition of the human spirit, an
abiding conquest of civilization. Now, as we have seen, it is the

BENEDETTO CROCE 33

sentiment that has faltered and weakened to a greater or lesser
extent in all parts of the present world.

Under a third aspect, on a third level, one may think of free-
dom in terms of the process by which the ideal of freedom and
the aspiration to freedom have been worked into a philosophical
concept and brought under a general conception of reality that
defines and justifies them; and here we perceive the intimate
connections that subsist between the history of the theory of
freedom and the history of philosophy which has so strongly
influenced, as it is still influencing, the former.

During the long period when metaphysical, transcendental
philosophies prevailed in Europe, the concept of freedom as
the law of life and history did not find the place that rightfully
belonged to it, and it experienced no end of difficulty and labor
in making its way forward. Even when the sense of freedom
was very keen it was a matter of feeling and conduct rather
than of theory. Now, one might ask, what was needed in order
that the ideal of freedom might find larger reference and sup-
port in a philosophy? The need, evidently, was that the same
negation of the transcendental that liberalism was making in the
practical field it should also make in the logical field and in
more and more comprehensive form. Philosophy, in other
words, had to be a philosophy of absolute immanentism, an im-
manentism of the spirit and therefore not naturalism and not
materialism, and not, either, a dualism of spirit and nature but
an absolute spiritualism. Moreover, since the spirit is a dialectic
of distinctions and oppositions, since the spirit is perpetual
growth, perpetual progress, philosophy had to be absolute his-
toricism.

Such a conception was very far indeed from ways of think-
ing in the country where the ideal of freedom found its first
and noblest expressions, and was so embodied in institutions and
in public and private morals as to supply most stimulating ex-
amples to the rest of the world. English philosophy in those
days was what it was to remain for two centuries more or less:
sensistic, utilitarian, empirical, and, in the religious field, agnos-
tic and possibilistic. The first-born offspring of liberalism was
therefore of all philosophies the one least qualified to provide

FREEDOM

34

a philosophical justification of the ideal and the practice of free-
dom.

To measure the full scope of this deficiency one has only to
glance again at John Stuart Mill’s famous treatise On Liberty.
Of the author’s sincere libertarian faith there can be no slight-
est doubt. But what cheap, what ignoble arguments he is pro-
vided with by his concepts of public welfare, happiness, wisdom,
opportuneness, human frailty! In view of this last, Mill argues,
as long as men are what they are, we had better allow free play
to differing individual opinions and traits, provided their exer-
cise involves no harm to one’s neighbor!

To wretched and fallacious reasonings of this type we owe a
widespread belief that liberalism is identical with utilitarian in-
dividualism, with “social atomism,” as Hegel said, and that it
regards the State as a mere instrument for helping individuals
in their quest for comforts and pleasures. If at all, one might
identify liberalism with moral individualism, viewing the State
as an instrument for attaining a nobler plane of living and
therefore, in the light of that assumption, requiring the individ-
ual to love it, serve it, and if need be die for it. Unfortunately,
in thinking along that line, not even the concept of the individ-
ual is analyzed critically enough. Utilitarian theory continues to
substantialize the individual as a monad, to naturalize him as a
physical person to be respected and -guaranteed as a physical
person ; whereas the individual should be resolved into the in-
dividuality of doing, into the individuality of the act, in other
words into the concreteness of universality.

Lack of definiteness in the moral ideal and superficial con-
ceptions of history have meantime led people to drouse fondly
in beliefs of a rosy progressive hue. It is assumed that such
things as elections, parliaments, and free discussion have once
and for all opened to mankind a royal road, a chemin de
velours, leading to higher and higher levels of existence, ever
more abundant comforts, ever greater wealth and power, a
steadily increasing culture and refinement, a greater and greater
splendor of civilization. On that theory the day of harsh con-
flicts and cruel devastations are supposed to be over. There are
to be no more wars and revolutions, no further danger of re-

BENEDETTO CROCE 35

lapses to lower forms of political and social living. There may
be some slight disturbance, but in the end everything will be
smoothed out in agreements arrived at through good-humored
conference. Actually, achievement of the moral ideal requires
unremitting effort and vigilancy on our part. We are obliged
continuously to reachieve with our labor and with our suffer-
ings all that we have inherited from those who have gone be-
fore us. The course of history — the “education of the human
race,” as Lessing called it — advances over roads that are rough
and rugged, roads that are broken by precipices and pitfalls and
strewn with killed and wounded. Just as the course of history
never ends in a finer and static condition of happiness, so it is
never able to signboard and utilize a way of progress that is
safe and sheltered from all mishap. All the worst in the worst
past can always return. But we should remember it will always
return under new conditions and, for that very reason, once we
have again mastered it, we will find that it has lifted us to a
higher and nobler plane. The epic of history stands closer to
the tragedy than to the idyl.

The fact that people have not grasped this truth, the fact that
they so readily succumbed to fatuous optimism, is the main
cause of the pessimism and the lack of confidence that prevail
so widely in the world today. The world is indeed beset by dif-
ficulties, but instead of thinking of these as natural aspects of
the individual life and of history as a whole, as manifestations
so to say, of life’s eternal rhythm, instead of ridding themselves
of their illusions and correcting their childish errors, such peo-
ple adopt the easier course of dropping the ideal itself — in other
words, the ideal of freedom — by swiftly denying it, only to be
left in a sort of stupor where they fall prey to one or another
of the political forms that are provided in a whirling dance
about us.

In another direction, in Germany, philosophy had gone far
beyond sensism, hedonism, utilitarianism, empiricism, and asso-
ciationism, but in the major philosophical systems ancient meta-
physical and theological elements survived among new and
original ideas. The tendency, therefore, was to subject the idea
of freedom to pre-established historical schemes and, in the

FREEDOM

36

political field, in view of the weakness of the liberal tradition
in German life, to smother it under the idea of the State, which
in turn was conceived as a sort of personified abstraction pos-
sessing many of the attributes and attitudes of the Hebrew God.

Worse yet, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Dar-
winism and evolutionism came to the fore and the liberal ideal
began to be justified with concepts deriving from such doctrines
as the struggle for existence or the survival of the fittest, and
from the habit of thinking of men as mere animals. Therewith
the dialectic, the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the alternating
victories and defeats, the progressive solutions, which liberalism
had regarded as part and parcel of its spiritual conception of
life, gave way to picturings and admiring descriptions of wild
beasts clawing at one another and devouring and destroying
one another.

The fact that a theory gives an inadequate or inappropriate
account of a thing by no means implies that the thing is not
enjoying a fulsome and exuberant prosperity, so long as the
vital force that is at work within it is vigorous and inspiring.
Often excellent paintings, poems, or sculptures are produced by
men who hold fantastic, conventional, or outmoded theories on
art, and acts of the highest morality and nobility are performed
quite unpretentiously by men who profess the crudest and most
hardhearted materialisms. For a person to act in one way and
think in another involves, of course, incoherence and lack of
balance. There are such cases, however, and we see that there
must be, once we remember that we reach coherence through
our incoherences, we attain our balance from our frequent stum-
blings. The fiery and fruitful development of liberalism in
England and all over Europe in the nineteenth century dashed
the absolutisms to earth, liberated oppressed peoples from for-
eign dominions and united them into great states. It created a
supple form of living that enjoyed an intense interchange
among the nations of economic but also of moral, intellectual,
and esthetic values.

It is in no way surprising that the theory of liberty, mean-
time, should have groveled on the wretched planes just de-
scribed. A Cavour was so deeply and devoutly inspired by the

BENEDETTO CROCE 37

ideal of freedom that in him the word and the deed seemed a
living theory, so that nothing more was needed. But that is not
the case when the practical urge has weakened, when the vision
is veiled or is growing dim, when action falters, draws back, or
even renounces and betrays its ideal to fall in with the current
that, it once combated. And meantime false ideas, mistaken
opinions, mendacious histories, step forward as though to de-
liver an unflattering obituary for the liberty that is reported
dead or to inscribe a condemnatory epitaph upon her waiting
tomb. At such times it becomes imperative to have a truly ade-
quate theory of freedom. As he stands waiting for the practical
revival to dawn again the thinker should start things going in
his own field, he should scatter the clouds that are gathering
above it and bring clear skies back into the domain of thought.
The time when freedom is dead or dying in others is the time
when she should resume the weaving of her tapestry before the
thinker’s mind.

This reconsideration of the problem of freedom, this con-
struction or reconstruction of the foundations of the theory of
liberty, should also help us to correct a number of mistaken im-
pressions that more directly affect the life of our times. One of
these regards the relationship — not very adequately understood
as yet— between “moral liberalism,” liberalism proper, and
“economic liberalism,” or free trade. This is not a relationship
of cause and effect, of principle and consequence, of premise
and conclusion. It is a relationship of form and matter. The
economic life becomes matter as compared with conscience, and
matter are the various systems that economic life proposes — free
trade, protectionism, monopoly, planned economy, economic
autarchy, and the like. No one of these systems can claim moral
status as against the other, since they are all economic and non-
moral and can each, in the various situations that eventuate in
history, be either adopted or rejected by the moral man. The
same may be said of property systems, capitalistic, communistic,
or otherwise, which are necessarily variable and can never be
fixed on by reference to any moral law. It might seem possible
to fix on one or the other of them with reference to some dream
of a general and permanent state of comfort or welfare. But

38 FREEDOM

such a dream would not only be utopian. Intrinsically it would
have nothing to do with -ethics. Morals envisage no impossible
state of individual or general comfort. They are exclusively
concerned with an excelsius .

Another mistaken notion comes to us from the opposite direc-
tion— not from laissez faire and free trade, but from the com-
munists. This is the distinction that is drawn between a “legal”
or “formal” or “theoretical” freedom and an “actual” or “real”
freedom. The first sort of freedom is the one that was allegedly
bestowed upon the peoples by the Revolution of 1789 and
which has been made deceptive and unreal because it has not
been accompanied by the second and, worse yet, has been used
as a pretext to resist propaganda or action for the second. On
careful examination, freedom of the first sort, the allegedly
“legal” or “formal” freedom, turns out to be the real and actual
freedom — freedom as a moral principle and therefore the only
freedom. The other sort, which is called “actual” and “real,”
is not freedom at all, but just a name for a communist and
equalitarian system of economic organization. The fact that the
two things have, with revolting callousness to facts, been sub-
sumed under one concept by exponents of the economic inter-
pretation of history is just another instance of the obtuseness
which that school of thought has encouraged towards every-
thing pertaining to the spiritual and moral life.

It cannot be argued, in rebuttal, that the communist ideal, as
merely economic, is, among the various possible or plausible
ideals, adapted to certain conditions and more or less perma-
nent in relation to them. The communist system, to begin with,
is very improperly called a system of “equality” and “justice,”
but that is not the point here. What we must reject is the asser-
tion that represents that system of economic organization as the
foundation, and liberty as the pinnacle, of the social edifice.
Liberty is not dependent on any particular economic system, or
on either of the two systems here contrasted. It calls all systems
to the bar of judgment and accepts or rejects any or all accord-
ing to the case. If, therefore, one insists in the face of the facts
on conceiving the relationship upside down, there is nothing to
do except to begin by founding the equalitarian economic order,

BENEDETTO CROCE

39

without reference to freedom and consent, and resorting to vio-
lence. Then, in line with the principle that states are upheld by
the same forces that create them, one can only go on and uphold
the equalitarian order by violence and suppress freedom.

The truth of this contention is so obvious from the stand-
point of reason and logic that it would hardly be necessary to
seek a verification of it in the facts. Yet the verification has
been supplied, and in no doubtful terms, by a number of the
so-called proletarian dictatorships of our time. These systems
can pretend to establish liberty in their written constitutions.
They cannot achieve it in the fact, any more than they can
divest themselves of their dictatorial character — divest them-
selves, that is, of their actual selves. As in the case just men-
tioned, therefore, the real relationship is the reverse one: first
and fundamental, freedom, which judges, accepts, or rejects
either or any system of economic organization according as the
latter shows itself to be morally the more salutary and thereby
economically the more advantageous in the conditions supplied
at the given historical moment.

One might touch briefly, also, on a third misapprehension
which comes to us not from the battle of conflicting economic
systems but from the more strictly political field, the field of
diplomacy. There we find a formula of “nonintervention,”
which decks itself out in a halo of liberalism and declares hum-
ble deference to the rights particular countries have of freely
working out their problems and fighting out their domestic
quarrels even by civil war.

In the background of such propositions lurks a very impor-
tant truth, the truth that the government of a given country is
in duty bound to consider the vital interests entrusted to it and
to concern itself with the affairs of other countries only as these
affect those interests in line of prospect or menace, advantage
or harm. This truth, however, is never the predominant con-
sideration with those who use the formula. The pious respect
that is professed for the self-determination of the peoples must
be classed with the political hypocrisies. The principle is evi-
dently not applied, and is in fact inapplicable, to the so-called
backward or uncivilized peoples and cannot be applied, either,

FREEDOM

40

to peoples who fall into temporary conditions of civic inferior-
ity. The interests that the given government is called upon to
protect all by itself cannot be conceived in terms of an exclu-
sive and abstract particularity. All countries participate in the
common life of Europe, or of the world. To refuse to consider
the moral vicissitudes of peoples beyond one’s own country’s
frontiers involves, first of all, exposing one’s country to the
danger of the froximus ardet JJcalegon . But then again such
policies are definitely unhealthy to the sense that a people must
have of itself. This sense cannot be satisfied by the mere idea of
power. It has to be re-enforced by a persuasion that the power
is beneficial to humanity — otherwise the country shrinks into a
sort of cynical selfishness that works against the country itself.

In the light of this truth a friend and co-worker of mine 2
saw fit, with some reason, to accuse the English sense of free-
dom of narrowness, in that the English seem to conceive of
liberty as a private, personal, or national possession of their
own, not as a universal human value which it is their duty to
spread abroad and with which the destinies of their own liber-
ties are necessarily bound up.

This reluctance— a very understandable reluctance — to em-
brace and apply an active international morality rests in part
on historical memories — memories of the Crusades, for instance,
which were so idealistic in their dreams and so unidealistic in
their realities and which anyhow failed 5 memories of certain
Catholic crusades, which were so unwisely undertaken by the
Spain of the Hapsburgs; or memories of the religious wars,
which laid Europe waste, drowned a continent in blood, and
ended not in the victory of one faith or the other, but in a re-
turn to the cuius regio eius religio , followed by a general out-
burst of rationalism and illuminism before which both Catholi-
cism and Protestantism gave ground.

This reluctance tends, at any rate, to lose sight of the fact
that morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political
expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or
group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally hu-
man, to diffuse and enhance which all of us must devote our

2 Omodeo, review of Fisher’s History of Eurofe , La Critica , Vol. XXXVI
(193s).

BENEDETTO CROCE

41

efforts of good will in the ways that are most appropriate to the
given case and which political wisdom must advise and guide.
No people will be truly free till all peoples are free.

I confess that I am not a little alarmed at the scant attention,
if any at all, that is being paid to the problem of freedom in the
philosophical literature of our time, and at the little interest
that is being shown in the vicissitudes and destinies of freedom
throughout the world. One can say the same, for that matter,
of literature in general — of the drama, of the novel, of histori-
cal writing.

This is just the opposite of what went on during the first half
of the nineteenth century, though it should be going on even
more intensely today when the liberties which were then won
are in danger of being lost and of having to be won again. Ac-
tually, philosophy and literature seem to be indifferent to the
distress of those who love our sacred heritage of freedom and
fear its passing. Philosophy is turning back to the old and far-
away problems of the schools, and literature to irrelevant senti-
ments and impulses; when indeed both philosophy and litera-
ture are not being placed at the service of adversaries of the lib-
eral ideal in an effort to construct a body of doctrine that will
help the oppressions that are being exercised and the various at-
tempts that are being made to brutalize the world.

For my part, for some two decades I have been trying to re-
vive interest in the subject of freedom through a number of
philosophical or historical treatises; and in the course of those
labors I have been impressed by the relatively imperfect state
in which the doctrine of liberty has been left by thinkers of the
past. The lightness of the armor, the ancientness and inade-
quacy of the weapons, with which they provided freedom may
in part account for the ineffectiveness of the defense that it has
made against the surprises and attacks that have of late been
hurled upon it. I have therefore set down here a few of the out-
lines of a doctrine of freedom that seem to me essential; but I
cannot end these pages without observing that the subject has
so many and such varied aspects, that it intertwines with so
many of the gravest problems of life and history, as to require
all the energy and talents that any number of scholars can de-
vote to it.

Alfred North Whitehead

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy , Harvard University

ASPECTS OF FREEDOM

r | ^HE cultural history of Western civilization for the pe-
I riod illuminated by written records can be considered

A from many aspects. It can be conceived under the guise
of a steady economic progression, diversified by catastrophic col-
lapses to lower levels. Such a point of view emphasizes tech-
nology and economic organization. Alternatively, history can be
conceived as a series of oscillations between worldliness and
otherworldliness, or as a theater of contest between greed and
virtue or between truth and error. Such points of view empha-
size religion, morality, and contemplative habits eliciting gen-
eralizations of thought. Each mode of consideration is a sort of
searchlight elucidating some of the facts, and retreating the re-
mainder into an omitted background. Of course in any history,
even with a restricted topic, limited to politics or to art or to
science, many points of view are in fact interwoven, each with
varying grades of generality.

One of the most general philosophic notions to be used in the
analysis of civilized activities is to consider the effect on social
life due to the variations of emphasis between Individual Abso-
luteness and Individual Relativity. Here ‘absoluteness 5 means
the notion of release from essential dependence on other mem-
bers of the community in respect to modes of activity, while
relativity means the converse fact of essential relatedness. In
one of their particularizations these ideas appear in the antago-
nism between notions of freedom and of social organization. In

42

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 43

another they appear in the relative importance to be ascribed to
the welfare of the State and to the welfare of its individual
members. The character of each epoch as to its social institu-
tions, its jurisprudence, its notions of ideal ends within the
range of practicability, depends largely upon those various
patches of activity within which one or the other of these no-
tions, individual absoluteness or individual relativity, is domi-
nant for that epoch. No period is wholly controlled by either
one of these extremes, reigning through its whole range of
activities. Repression in one direction is balanced by freedom
in others. Military discipline is severe. In the last resort indi-
vidual soldiers are sacrificed to the army. But in many fields of
human activity soldiers are left completely unfettered both by
regulation and by custom. For members of university faculties
the repressions and the freedoms are very different from those
which obtain for soldiers.

Distribution of emphasis between absoluteness and relativity
is seemingly arbitrary. Of course there is always a historical rea-
son for the pattern. Frequently the shifting of emphasis is to be
ascribed to the general tendency to revolt from the immediate
past — to interchange black and white wherever we find them.
Also the transformation may be a judgment upon dogmas held
responsible for inherited failures. It should be one function of
history to disengage such a judgment from the irritation due to
transient circumstances.

More often changes in the social pattern of intellectual em-
phasis arise from a shift of power from one class or group of
classes to another class or group of classes. For example, an oli-
garchic aristocratic government and a democratic government
may each tend to emphasize social organization, that is to say,
the relativity of individuals to the State. But governments
mainly satisfying the trading and professional classes, whether
nominally they be aristocratic, democratic, or absolute, empha-
size personal freedom, that is to say, individual absoluteness.
Governments of the latter kind have been that of Imperial
Rome with its middle-class imperial agents and its middle-class
Stoic lawyers and, in its happiest period, its middle-class em-

FREEDOM

44

perors; and that of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.

With the shift of dominant classes, points of view which in
one epoch are submerged, only to be detected by an occasional
ripple, later emerge into the foreground of action and literary
expression. Thus the various activities of each age — governmen-
tal, literary, scientific, religious, purely social— express the men-
talities of various classes in the community whose influence for
those topics happens to be dominant. In one of his speeches on
the American Revolution, Burke exclaims, “For heaven’s sake,
satisfy somebody”

Governments are best classified by considering who are the
‘somebodies’ they are in fact endeavoring to satisfy. Thus the
English government of the first sixty years of the eighteenth
century was, as to its form and its persons, aristocratic. But in
policy it was endeavoring to satisfy the great merchants of the
City of London and of the City of Bristol. Their dissatisfaction
was the immediate source of danger. Sir Robert Walpole and
William Pitt, the Great Commoner, personify the changing
moods of this class, in the earlier period sick of wars, and later
imperialistic.

In a period when inherited modes of life are operating with
their traditional standard of efficiency, or inefficiency, the class
to be actively satisfied may be relatively restricted, for example,
the merchants of eighteenth-century England. The majority
will then be relatively quiescent, and conservative statesmen,
such as Walpole, will be anxious to do nothing to stir the depths
— “ Quleta non movers” Walpole was an active reformer in re-
spect to trade interests, otherwise a conservative.

The corresponding statesmen in France were actively con-
cerned with the interests of the Court, whose power was based
on a bureaucracy (legal, administrative, and ecclesiastical), and
an army. As in contemporary England, the personnel of the
whole French organization, civil and military, was aristocratic
and middle class. French politics ran more smoothly, but un-
fortunately for France its active political element was more di-
vorced from the main interests of the country than the active
element in England, though in each country government ex-

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 45

hibited its periods of insight and folly. The French emphasis
was towards co-ordination, the English towards individual free-
dom. In the latter portion of this century, in England the more
active class politically were the rural landowners. Note for
instance the way in which, at the end of his political life, Burke
hugs the improbable belief that he understood agriculture.
Also the municipality of the City of London was in the earlier
period an element of support for the government, and— -until
the excesses of the French Revolution — in the later period an
element of opposition.

In the later period the oncoming industrial revolution ab-
sorbed the energies of that English industrial class whom at
the earlier period the slogan “the Protestant Succession” had
stirred to political activity because for them it spelled “Indus-
trial Freedom.” The mass of the people were now, towards the
end of the century, stirring uneasily, as yet ignorant of the ways
in which their interests were being determined, and with its bet-
ter members engaged in saving their souls according to the di-
rections of John Wesley. Finally out of this welter, after a de-
lay caused by the wars of the French Revolution, the Victorian
epoch emerged. The solution was merely temporary, and so is
the planet itself.

II

In our endeavor to understand sociological change we must
not concentrate too exclusively on the effect of abstract doctrine,
verbally formulated and consciously assented to. Such elaborate
intellectual efforts play their part in preserving or transforming
or destroying. For example, the history of Europe is not to be
understood without some reference to the Augustinian doctrines
of original sin, of divine grace, and of the consequent mission of
the Catholic Church. The history of the United States requires
in addition some knowledge of the English political doctrines of
the seventeenth century, and of French thought in the eight-
eenth century. Men are driven by their thoughts as well as by
the molecules in their bodies, by intelligence and by senseless
forces. Social history, however, concentrates on modes of human
experience prevalent at different periods. The physical condi-

FREEDOM

46

tions are merely the background which partially controls the
flux of modes and of moods. Even here we must not overintel-
lectualize the various types of human experience. Mankind is
the animal at the head of the Primates, and cannot escape habits
of mind which cling closely to habits of body.

Our consciousness does not initiate our modes of functionings.
We awake to find ourselves engaged in process, immersed in
satisfactions and dissatisfactions, and actively modifying, either
by intensification or by attenuation or by the introduction of
novel purposes. This primary procedure which is presupposed
in consciousness, I will term “instinct.” It is the mode of ex-
perience directly arising out of the urge of inheritance, individ-
ual and environmental. Also, after instinct and intellectual fer-
ment have done their work, there is a decision which determines
the mode of coalescence of instinct with intelligence. I will term
this factor “wisdom.” It is the function of wisdom to act as a
modifying agency on the intellectual ferment so as to produce a
self-determined issue from the given conditions. Thus for the
purpose of understanding social institutions, this crude three-
fold division of human nature is required: instinct, intelligence,
wisdom.

But this division must not be made too sharply. After all, in-
tellectual activity is itself an inherited factor. We do not initiate
thought by an effort of self-consciousness. We find ourselves
thinking, just as we find ourselves breathing and enjoying the
sunset. There is a habit of daydreaming, and a habit of thought-
ful elucidation. Thus the autonomy of thought is strictly lim-
ited, often negligible, generally beyond the threshold of con-
sciousness. The ways of thought of a nation are as much instinc-
tive — that is to say, are subject to routine — as are its ways of
emotional reaction. But most of us believe that there is a spon-
taneity of thought which lies beyond routine. Otherwise, the
moral claim for freedom of thought is without meaning. This
spontaneity of thought is, in its turn, subject to control as to its
maintenance and efficiency. Such control is the judgment of the
whole, attenuating or strengthening the partial flashes of self-
determination. The whole determines what it wills to be, and
thereby adjusts the relative importance of its own inherent

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 47

flashes of spontaneity. This final determination is its wisdom or,
in other words, its subjective aim as to its own nature, with its
limits set by inherited factors.

Wisdom is proportional to the width of the evidence made
effective in the final self-determination. The intellectual opera-
tions consist in the co-ordination of notions derived from the
primary facts of instinctive experience into a logically coherent
system. Those facts, whose qualitative aspects are thus co-ordi-
nated, gain importance in the final self-determination. This in-
tellectual co-ordination is more readily achieved when the pri-
mary facts are selected so as to dismiss the baffling aspects of
things into intellectual subordination. For this reason intellec-
tual activity is apt to flourish at the expense of wisdom. To some
extent, to understand is always to exclude a background of in-
tellectual incoherence. But wisdom is persistent pursuit of the
deeper understanding, ever confronting intellectual system with
the importance of its omissions. These three elements, instinct,
intelligence, wisdom, cannot be torn apart. They integrate, re-
act, and merge into hybrid factors. It is the case of the whole
emerging from its parts, and the parts emerging within the
whole. In judging social institutions, their rise, their culmina-
tion, and their decay, we have to estimate the types of instinct,
of intelligence, and of wisdom which have co-operated with nat-
ural forces to develop the story. The folly of intelligent people,
clearheaded and narrow visioned, has precipitated many catas-
trophes.

However far we go back in recorded history, we are within
the period of the high-grade functioning of mankind, far re-
moved from mere animal savagery. Also, within that period it
would be difficult to demonstrate that mankind has improved
upon its inborn mental capacity. Yet there can be no doubt that
there has been an immense expansion of the outfit which the
environment provides for the service of thought. This outfit can
be summarized under the headings modes of communication,
physical and mental, writing, preservation of documents, va-
riety of modes of literature, critical thought, systematic thought,
constructive thought, history, comparison of diverse languages,
mathematical symbolism, improved technology providing phys-

FREEDOM

48

ical ease. This list is obviously composed of many partially re-
dundant and overlapping items. But it serves to remind us of
the various ways in which we have at our service facilities for
thought and suggestions for thought far beyond those at hand
for our predecessors who lived anywhere from two to five thou-
sand years ago. Indeed the last two hundred years has added
to this outfit in a way which may create a new epoch unless
mankind degenerates. Of course, a large share of this outfit had
already accumulated between two and three thousand years ago.
It is the brilliant use which the leading men of that millennium
made of their opportunities which makes us doubt of any im-
provement in the native intelligence of mankind.

But the total result is that we now discern a certain simple-
mindedness in the way our predecessors adjusted themselves to
inherited institutions. To a far greater extent the adjustment
was a matter of course, in short, it was instinctive. In the great
period they discovered what we have inherited. But there was a
naivety about the discovery, a surprise. Instinctive adaptation
was so pervasive that it was unnoticed. Probably the Egyptians
did not know that they were governed despotically, or that the
priests limited the royal power, because they had no alternative
as a contrast either in fact or in imagination. They were nearer
in their thoughts to the political philosophy prevalent in an
anthill.

Another aspect of this fact is that in such societies, relativity
is stressed rather than individual freedom. Indeed, in the earlier
stages freedom is almost a meaningless notion. Action and mood
both spring from an instinct based upon ancestral co-ordination.
In such societies, whatever is not the outcome of inherited rela-
tivity, imposing co-ordination of action, is sheer destructive
chaos. Alien groups are then evil groups. An energetic prophet
hewed Agag in pieces. Unfortunately the spiritual descendants
of Samuel still survive, archaic nuisances.

Ill

We can watch some of the episodes in the discovery of free-
dom. About fourteen hundred years before Christ the Egyptian

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 49

king Akhenaton evidently belonged to an advanced group who
thought for themselves and made a step beyond the inherited
religious notions. Such groups, with flashes of free thought,
must have arisen sporadically many times before, during count-
less thousands of years, some successful and most of them fail-
ures. Otherwise the transition to civilization, as distinct from the
mere diversity of adaptations of thoughtless customs, could
never have arisen. Bees and ants have diverse social organiza-
tions; but, so far as we know, neither species is in any sense
civilized. They may enjoy thoughtless adaptations of social cus-
toms. Anyhow their flashes of freedom are below the level that
we can discern. But Akhenaton, having exercised his freedom,
evidently had no conception of freedom as such. We have all
the evidence archaeology can provide that he rigidly endeav-
ored to impose his notions upon the thoughts and customs of
the whole Egyptian nation. Apparently he failed; for there was
a reaction. But reactions never restore with minute accuracy.
Thus in all probability there remained a difference which the
evidence before us is unable to discriminate.

A more successful group were the Hebrew prophets about
eight or nine hundred years later. Spurred by the evils of their
times they exercised a freedom in the expression of moral intui-
tion, and fitted out the character of Jehovah with the results of
their thoughts. Our civilization owes to them more than we can
express. They constitute one of the few groups of men who
decisively altered history in any intimate sense. Most spectacular
upheavals merely replace one set of individuals by another an-
alogous set; so that history is mostly a barren change of names.
But the Hebrew prophets really produced a decisive qualitative
alteration, and what is still more rare, a change for the better;
yet the conception of freedom never entered into the point of
view of the Jehovah of the prophets. Intolerance is the beset-
ting sin of moral fervor. The first important pronouncement in
which tolerance is associated with moral fervor is in the Parable
of the Tares and the Wheat, some centuries later.

Subsequent examples of intolerance supervening upon the ex-
ercise of freedom are afforded by the Christian Church after its
establishment by Constantine and by the Protestants under the

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50

guidance of Luther and Calvin. At the period of the Reforma-
tion mankind had begun to know better and so charity of judg-
ment upon the Reformers begins to wear thin. But then charity
is a virtue allied to tolerance, so we must be careful. All ad-
vanced thinkers, skeptical or otherwise, are apt to be intolerant,
in the past and also now. On the whole, tolerance is more often
found in connection with a genial orthodoxy. The apostles of
modern tolerance — in so far as it exists — are Erasmus, the
Quakers, and John Locke. They should be commemorated in
every laboratory, in every church, and in every court of law.
We must however remember that many of the greatest seven-
teenth-century statesmen and thinkers, including John Locke,
owed their lives to the wide tolerance of the Dutch Republic.

Certainly these men were not the originators of their admi-
rable ideas. To find the origins we must go behind them for two
thousand years. So slow is translation of idea into custom. We
must however first note that the examples cited have all been
concerned with religion. There are other forms of behavior, ac-
tive and contemplative. The Athenians have given us the first
surviving instance of the explicit recognition of the importance
of tolerance in respect to varieties of social behavior. No doubt
antecedent civilizations must have provided many practical ex-
amples of it. For example, it is difficult to believe that in big
metropolitan cities such as Babylon and Nineveh, there was
much detailed supervision of social behavior. On the other hand,
the ways of life in Egypt seem to have been tightly organized.
But the first explicit defense of social tolerance, as a requisite
for high civilization, is found in the speech of Pericles as re-
ported by Thucydides. It puts forth the conception of the or-
ganized society successfully preserving freedom of behavior for
its individual members. Fifty years later, in the same social
group, Plato introduced deeper notions from which all claims
for freedom must spring. His general concept of the psychic fac-
tors in the Universe stressed them as the source of all spon-
taneity, and ultimately as the ground of all life and motion.
The human psychic activity thus contains the origins of precious
harmonies within the transient world. The end of human so-
ciety is to elicit such psychic energies. But spontaneity is of the

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 5 I

essence of soul. Such in outline is the argument from Platonic
modes of thought to the importance of social freedom.

Plato’s own writings constitute one prolonged apology for
freedom of contemplation, and for freedom for the communica-
tion of contemplative experiences, in the persistent exercise of
this right Socrates and Plato lived, and it was on its behalf that
Socrates died.

The establishment of freedom requires more than its mere
intellectual defense. Plato above all men introduced into the
world this further essential element of civilization. For he ex-
hibited the tone of mind which alone can maintain a free so-
ciety, and he expressed the reasons justifying that tone. His
Dialogues are permeated with a sense of the variousness of the
Universe, not to be fathomed by our intellects, and in his Sev-
enth Epistle he expressly disclaims the possibility of an ade-
quate philosophic system. The moral of his writings is that all
points of view, reasonably coherent and in some sense with an
application, have something to contribute to our understanding
of the universe, and also involve omissions whereby they fail
to include the totality of evident fact. The duty of tolerance
is our finite homage to the abundance of inexhaustible novelty
which is awaiting the future, and to the complexity of accom-
plished fact which exceeds our stretch of insight.

Thus two types of character must be excluded from those ef-
fectually promoting freedom. One type belongs to those who
despair of attaining any measure of truth, the Skeptics. Such
temperaments can obviously have no message for those who
hold that thought does count. Again the pursuit of freedom
with an intolerant mentality is self-defeating. For all his equip-
ment of imagination, learning, and literary magnificence in de-
fense of freedom, the example of Milton’s life probably does as
much to retard the cause as to advance it. He promotes a frame
of mind of which the issue is intolerance.

The ancient world of paganism was tolerant as to creeds. Pro-
vided that your actions conformed, your speculations were un-
noticed. Indeed, one mark of progress beyond purely instinctive
social relations is an uneasy feeling as to the destructive effect of
speculative thought. Creeds are at once the outcome of specula-

FREEDOM

5 ^

tion and efforts to curb speculation. But they are always rele-
vant to it. Antecedently to speculation there can be no creeds.
Wherever there is a creed, there is a heretic round the corner or
in his grave. Amid the great empires, Egyptian, Mesopotamian,
and Hittite, and with the discovery of navigation, the inter-
course between races promoted shrewd comparisons gradually
broadening into speculative thought. In its beginnings this shift
in human mentality must have developed slowly. Where there
is no anticipation, change has to wait upon chance, and peters
out amid neglect. Fortunately the Bible preserves for us frag-
ments of the process as it affected one gifted race at a nodal
point. The record has been written up by editors with the men-
tality of later times. Thus the task of modern scholars is analo-
gous to an endeavor to recover the histories of Denmark and
Scotland from a study of Hamlet and Macbeth . We can see ini-
tial antagonisms broadening into speculative attempts to ration-
alize the welter. We can watch Samuel and Agag succeeded by
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. There are the meditations of
Job and his friends, the prophetical books, and the "wisdom”
books of the Bible. And with a leap of six hundred years one
version of the story ends with the creed of the Council at
Nicaea.

IV

The episode of Greek civilization during its short phase of
independence created a new situation. Speculation was explicitly
recognized. It was ardently pursued. Its various modes and
methods were discovered. The relation of the Greeks to their
predecessors is analogous, as to stretch of time and intensity of
effect, to that of the second phase of the modern industrial rev-
olution during the last fifty years to the first phase, which in
truth sprawls over the long centuries from the fifteenth century
to the close of the nineteenth.

By reason of its inheritance from the episode of Hellenic cul-
ture the Roman Empire was more self-conscious than its prede-
cessors in its treatment of the problem of liberty and of the al-
lied problem of social institutions. So far as concerns Western
Europe, the origin of the medieval civilization must be dated

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 53

from the Emperor Augustus and the journeys of Paul. For the
Byzantine, Semitic, Egyptian area, the date must be pushed
back to the death of Alexander the Great, and the renaissance
of Greco-Egyptian learning. For the first two centuries after
Augustus the former area, centered in Italy, was incomparably
the more important. Latin literature is the translation of Hel-
lenic culture into the medieval modes of thought, extending
that period to end with the French Revolution. Throughout
that whole period culture was backward looking. Lucretius,
Cicero, Vergil were medievals in their relation to Hellenic lit-
erature and speculation, though they lacked the Semitic factor.
After that first Latin period, the notable contributions to
thought, Pagan, Christian, and Mohammedan, all derive from
the eastern region, with the important exception of Augustine.
Finally, the center of culture again swings westward, as the
Eastern civilization collapses under the prolonged impacts of
Tartars and Turks. The notes of these three allied cultures, the
Eastern, the Latin, and the later European, are scholarly learn-
ing, recurrence to Hellenic speculation restated in creedal forms,
imitative literatures stressing humane aspirations, the canaliza-
tion of curiosity into professional grooves, and — in the West —
a new grade of intelligence exhibited in the development of a
variety of social institutions. It is this last factor which has saved
the progress of mankind.

The new epoch in the formation of social institutions un-
folded itself very gradually. It is not yet understood in its full
importance. Social philosophy has not grasped the relevant prin-
ciples, so that even now each case is treated as a peculiar fact.
But the problem of liberty has been transformed by it. The
novelty consists in the deliberate formation of institutions, em-
bodying purposes of special groups, and unconcerned with the
general purposes of any political state, or of any embodiment of
tribal unity playing the part of a state. Of course any big empire
involves a coalescence of diverse tribes, customs, and modes of
thought. But in the earlier examples, each subject race had its
own status in the complex empire, and its ways of procedure
were part of the imperial system. Also there must have been
complex modes of behavior, peculiar to the various races, in-

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54

herited and tolerated as a matter of course. In the case of the
smaller units such as the Greek city states, we find a condition
of affairs in which all corporate action is an element in state
policy. The freedom was purely individual, never corporate.
All incorporation, religious or secular, was communal, or patri-
archal. The saying, “Render unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s” was uttered
by Christ in the reign of Tiberius, and not by Plato four hun-
dred years earlier. However limited may be the original inten-
tion of the saying, very quickly God was conceived as a principle
of organization in complete disjunction from Caesar.

It is interesting to speculate on the analogies and differences
between the deaths of Socrates and of Paul. Both were martyrs.
Socrates died because his speculative opinions were held to be
subversive of the communal life. It is difficult to believe that
the agents of Claudius or Nero or Galba were much concerned
with Paul’s speculative opinions as to the ways of God to man.
Later on, Lucian’s opinions were as unorthodox as Paul’s. But
he died in his bed. Unfortunately for Paul, as he journeyed he
left behind him organized groups, indulging in activities unco-
ordinated with any purposes of state. Thus imperial agents were
alarmed and sympathized with popular prejudice. Indeed, we
know exactly what one of the best of the Roman emperors about
half a century later thought of the matter. Trajan in his letter
to the younger Pliny dismisses Christian theology as negligible.
He is even unconcerned with the organization of Christians into
groups, so long as no overt action emerges affronting the tradi-
tional association of the State with religion. Yet he recognizes
that the Christians will fit into no current political philosophy,
and that they represent corporate actions on the verge of the
intolerable. Thus if circumstances unearth them, they are to be
questioned, dismissed if possible, but punished when their ac-
tions become glaring. It is interesting to compare the Christians
in the Roman Empire, from Nero to Trajan, with the commu-
nists in modern America.

Trajan shows himself as a fine statesman dealing with the
faint dawn of a new epoch, not understood, and indeed not yet
understood. The old organization of mankind was being af-

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 55

fected by the influence of the new width of intellectuality due
to Hellenism. Organizations mainly derived from blind in-
heritance, and affected by the intellect only in detail and in in-
terpretation, are to receive the shock of other types founded
primarily on the intellectual appreciation of private ends, that
is to say, of ends unconcerned with the State. What Henry Os-
born Taylor has termed “rational consideration” is becoming
a major force in human organization. Of course, Plato and Aris-
totle exhibited rational consideration on a magnificent scale. But
a group of thinkers do not necessarily constitute a political force.
Centuries, sometimes thousands of years, have to elapse before
thought can capture action. It is typical of this gap that Aris-
totle ? s manuscripts are said to have been stowed in a cellar for
two hundred years, and that even to this day Plato is mainly
valued as a religious mystic and a supreme literary artist. In
these latter functions, Plato represents the world he inherited
and not the world he created. Perhaps these constitute his best
part. But he played two roles.

The situation in the Roman Empire was in effect novel.
Pericles had conceived a freedom for private actions, of a cer-
tain civilized type within narrowly restricted bounds. Plato
voices the claim for contemplative freedom. But the Empire
was faced with the claim for freedom of corporate action. Mod-
ern political history, from that day to this, is the confused story
of the strenuous resistance of the State, and of its partial conces-
sions. The Empire reasserted the old doctrine of the Divine
Emperor 5 but also yielded by admitting as legal principle the
Stoic doctrine of the Voice of Nature. The Middle Ages com-
promised with the doctrine of the two swords. In recent times,
the State is fighting behind its last ditch, which is the legal doc-
trine of sovereignty. The thought of the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries rationalized its political philosophy under the
fiction of the “Original Contract.” This concept proved itself
formidable. It helped to dismiss the Stuarts into romance, to
found the American Republic, and to bring about the French
Revolution. Indeed, it was one of the most timely notions
known to history. Its weakness is that it antedates the era of the
importance of rational consideration, and overestimates the po-

FREEDOM

56

litical importance which at any time reason has possessed. The
antagonistic doctrine was that of the “Divine Right of Kings / 31
which is the ghost of the “Divine Emperor.”

V

Political philosophy can claim no exemption from the doc-
trine of the golden mean. Unrestricted liberty means complete
absence of any compulsory co-ordination. Human society in the
absence of any compulsion is trusting to the happy co-ordination
of individual emotions, purposes, affections, and actions. Civili-
zation can only exist amid a population which in the mass does
exhibit this fortunate mutual adaptation. Unfortunately a mi-
nority of adverse individual instances, when unchecked, are suf-
ficient to upset the social structure. A few men in the whole
caste of their character, and most men in some of their actions,
are antisocial in respect to the peculiar type of any society pos-
sible in their time. There can be no evasion of the plain fact that
compulsion is necessary and that compulsion is the restriction of
liberty.

It follows that a doctrine as to the social mingling of liberty
and compulsion is required. A mere unqualified demand for
liberty is the issue of shallow philosophy, equally noxious with
the antithetical cry for mere conformation to standard pattern.
Probably there can be no one solution of this problem adapted
to all the circumstances of human societies which have been and
will be. We must confine ourselves to the way in which at the
present day the issue is being adjusted in the Western civiliza-
tion, European and American.

The organization of professions by means of self-governing
institutions places the problem of liberty at a new angle. For
now it is the institution which claims liberty and also exercises
control. In ancient Egypt the Pharaoh decided, acting through
his agents. In the modern world a variety of institutions have
the power of action without immediate reference to the State.
This new form of liberty which is the autonomous institution
limited to special purposes was exemplified in the guilds of the
Middle Ages; and that period was characterized by a remark-

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 57

able growth of civilized genius. The meaning that — -in England
at least — was then assigned to the word “liberty” illustrates the
projection of the new social structure upon the older form of
customary determination. For a “liberty” did not then mean a
general freedom, but a special license to a particular group to
organize itself within a special field of action. For this reason
“liberties” were sometimes a general nuisance.

Of course the Catholic Church was the great “liberty” which
first confronted the Roman Empire, and then dominated me-
dieval life. In its early stages it is seen in its proper theoretical
relation to other autonomous societies. For example in the pa-
gan Empire, its legal status seems to have been analogous to
that of the pagan burial societies; although the status of the
Church property before the age of Constantine has not yet been
finally elucidated by scholars. But in the Middle Ages, the
Church so towered above other institutions that it outrivaled
the state itself. Accordingly its analogy to secular guilds and to
other professional institutions such as universities was obscured
by its greatness. The Catholic Church had another characteristic
of priceless value. It was, so far as concerned Europe, universal,
that is to say, Catholic. Until the approach of the Renaissance
there were no European nations in the modern sense. But the
Church transcended all governmental boundaries, all racial di-
visions and all geographic divisions. It was a standing challenge
to any form of communal despotism, a universal “liberty.”

VI

From the beginning of the sixteenth century this first form of
institutional civilization, with its feudalism, its guilds, its uni-
versities, its Catholic Church, was in full decay. The new mid-
dle classes, whether scholars or traders, would have none of it.
They were individualists. For them the universities -were sec-
ondary, the monasteries were a nuisance, the Church was a nui-
sance, feudalism was a nuisance, the guilds were a nuisance. They
wanted good order, and to be let alone with their individual
activities. The great thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were singularly detached from universities. Erasmus

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58

wanted printers, and Bacon, Hervey, Descartes, Galileo, Leib-
nitz, wanted governmental patronage, or protection, more than
university colleagues, mostly reactionary. When Luther, Des-
cartes, Galileo, or Leibnitz shifted his residence, it was not to
find a better university, but a more suitable government — a
Duke who would protect, a Prince who would pay, or a Dutch
Republic which would not ask questions. Nevertheless, the uni-
versities survived the change better than other institutions. In
some ways it was a great time for them, though they shrank to
the national. What finally emerged was the modern national
organization of Europe with the sovereign State dictating every
form of institutional organization, as subordinate elements for
its own purposes. This was a recurrence to that earlier form of
human organization which showed its faint signs of decay during
the period of the Roman Empire. Naturally there were great
differences. For nothing is ever restored. In fact the reaction was
a failure, because mankind has outgrown the simplicities of the
earlier form of civilization.

The political philosophy of the modern era was a retrogres-
sion, based upon a recurrence to the philosophers and lawyers of
the old classical civilizations. The Middle Ages, in the simpli-
fied form of the relations of Church with State, were consider-
ing the problem of a civilization in which men owed a divided
allegiance to many intersecting institutions pursuing diverse
ends. This is the real problem in a world dominated by frater-
nity derived from the catholic diffusion of ideas and from the
international distribution of property. The solution provided
by the doctrine of the sole sovereignty of the State, however
grateful to Protestants and to sovereigns, is both shocking and
unworkable, a mere stick with which to beat Papists in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, a mere way to provide police-
men for the countinghouses of merchants. But, amid this reac-
tionary triumph of Periclean individualism in the political phi-
losophies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was
an outcrop of institutions based upon the vigor of modern intel-
lectual interests. These institutions, even when national, were
concerned with interests impartial among the nations. These
were the centuries in which science triumphed, and science is

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 59

universal. Thus scientific institutions, though in form national,
informally established a catholic league. Again the advance of
scholarship, and of natural science, transformed the professions.
It intellectualized them far beyond their stage of advance in
earlier times. Professions first appear as customary activities
largely modified by detached strains of theory. Theories are
often wrong j and some of the earlier professional doctrines
erred grievously and were maintained tenaciously. Doctrines
emerged as plausible deductions, and survived as the wisdom of
ancestors. Thus the older professional practice was rooted upon
custom, though it was turning towards the intellectual sunlight.
Here and there individuals stood out far in advance of their
colleagues. For example, in the fourteen hundred years separat-
ing Galen from Vesalius, the standard of European medical
practice was not to be compared with the attainments of either
of these men. Also more than a century after Vesalius, Charles
II of England on his deathbed was tortured by physicians em-
ploying futile remedies customary at that time. Again, as a de-
signing engineer Leonardo da Vinci was unequaled until the
advent of Vauban and James Watt. In the earlier centuries the
professional influence, as a general sociological fact, was mainly
a welter of bygone flashes of intelligence relapsing into custom-
ary procedures. It represented the continual lapse of intellect
into instinct. But the culmination of science completely inverted
the roles of custom and intelligence in the older professions. By
this inversion professional institutions have acquired an inter-
national life. Each such institution practices within its own na-
tion, but its sources of life are world-wide. Thus loyalties
stretch beyond sovereign States.

Perhaps the most important function of these institutions is
the supervision of standards of individual professional compe-
tence and of professional practice. For this purpose there is a
complex interweaving of universities and more specialized insti-
tutions. The problem of freedom comes in here. For it is not
opinions which are censured, but learning and ability. Thus in
the more important fields of thought, opinion is free and so are
large divergencies of practice. The community is provided with
objective information as to the sort of weight to be attached to

FREEDOM

6o

individuals and as to the sort of freedom of action which may
safely be granted. Whatever is done can be subjected to the test
of general professional opinion, acting through this network of
institutions. Further, even large freedom can now be allowed
to nonprofessional individuals. For the great professional or-
ganizations, so long as they are efficient, should be able to dem-
onstrate the dangers of extravagant notions. In this way, where
sudden action is not in question, reason has obtained an entrench-
ment which should be impregnable. Indeed individual freedom,
standing apart from organization, has now its indispensable
role. For all organizations are liable to decay, and license for
outside criticism is the best safeguard for the professions.

Also the sovereign State of modern legal theory has its
sphere of action and its limitation. The State represents the
general wisdom of the community derived from an experience
broader than the topics of the various sciences. The role of the
State is a general judgment on the activity of the various or-
ganizations. It can judge whether they welcome ability, whether
they stand high among the kindred institutions throughout the
world. But where the State ceases to exercise any legitimate au-
thority is when it presumes to decide upon questions within the
purview of sciences or professions.

For example, in the teaching profession it is obvious that
young students cannot be subjected to the vagaries of individ-
ual teachers. In this sense, the claim for the freedom of teach-
ing is nonsense. But the general community is very incompetent
to determine either the subject matter to be taught or the per-
missible divergences to be allowed or the individual competence.
There can be only one appeal, and this is to general professional
opinion as exhibited in the practice of accredited institutions.
The appeal is catholic. The State of Tennessee did not err in
upholding the principle that there are limits to the freedom of
teaching in schools and colleges. But it exhibited a gross igno-
rance of its proper functions when it defied a professional opin-
ion which throughout the world is practically unanimous. Even
here that State is hardly to be blamed. For the current political
philosophy of sovereignty is very weak as to the limitations of
moral authority. Of course whoever at any moment has physi-

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 6 1

cal power has that power of physical compulsion, whether he
be a bandit or a judge or political ruler. But moral authority is
limited by competence to attain those ends whose immediate
dominance is evident to enlightened wisdom. Political loyalty
ceases at the frontiers of radical incapacity.

The functions of professional institutions have been consid-
ered in some detail because they constitute a clear-cut novelty
within modern societies. There were faint anticipations in the
ancient world, for example the schools at Athens, in particular
those founded by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, and elsewhere
the great foundation at Alexandria. Also later the theologians
of the Christian Church formed another professional group
which even stretched its claim to authority beyond all bounds of
good sense. It is by reason of these anticipations, and of the
legal developments of the Roman and Byzantine schools of
law, that the beginnings of the modern world, in respect to the
problem of freedom and of moral authority, have been placed
as early as Alexander and Augustus.

VII

In the immediate present, economic organization constitutes
the most massive problem of human relationships. It is passing
into a new phase, and presents confused outlines. Evidently
something new is developing. The individualistic liberalism of
the nineteenth century has collapsed, quite unexpectedly. So
long as the trading middle classes were dominant as the group
to be satisfied, its doctrines were self-evident. As soon as indus-
trialism and education produced in large numbers the modern
type of artisan, its whole basis was widely challenged. Again
the necessity for large capital, with the aid of legal ingenuity,
produced the commercial corporation with limited liability.
These fictitious persons are exempt from physiological death
and can only disappear by a voluntary dissolution or by bank-
ruptcy. The introduction into the arena of this new type of
‘person’ has considerably modified the effective meaning of the
characteristic liberal doctrine of contractual freedom. It is one
thing to claim such freedom as a natural right for human per-

FREEDOM

62

sons, and quite another to claim it for corporate persons. And
again the notion of private property had a simple obviousness
at the foot of Mount Sinai and even in the eighteenth century.
When there were primitive roads, negligible drains, private
wells, no elaborate system of credit, when payment meant the
direct production of gold pieces, when each industry was reason-
ably self-contained— in fact when the world was not as it is
now — then it was fairly obvious what was meant by private
property, apart from any current legal fictions. Today private
property is mainly a legal fiction, and apart from such legal de-
termination its outlines are completely indefinite. Such legal de-
termination is probably, indeed almost certainly, the best way
of arranging society. But the ‘voice of nature’ is a faint echo
when we are dealing with it. There is a striking analogy be-
tween the hazy notions of justice in Plato’s Republic, and the
hazy notions of private property today. The modern artisan,
like Thrasymachus of old, is apt to define it as ‘the will of the
stronger.’

Of course these extremes as to the nature of property —
simple-minded assertion and simple-minded denial — are exag-
geration. The whole concept of absolute individuals with abso-
lute rights, and with a contractual power of forming fully de-
fined external relations, has broken down. The human being is
inseparable from its environment in each occasion of its exist-
ence. The environment which the occasion inherits is immanent
in it, and conversely it is immanent in the environment which
it helps to transmit. The favorite doctrine of the shift from a
customary basis for society to a contractual basis is founded on
shallow sociology. There is no escape from customary status.
This status is merely another name for the inheritance imma-
nent in each occasion. Inevitably customary status is there, an
inescapable condition. On the other hand, the inherited status is
never a full determination. There is always the freedom for the
determination of individual emphasis. In terms of high-grade
human society, there is always the customary fact as an essential
element in the meaning of every contractual obligation. There
can be no contract which does not presuppose custom, and no
custom leaving no loophole for spontaneous contract. It is this

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 63

truth that gives vitality to the Anglo-American Common Law.
It is an instrument, in the hands of skilled experts, for the in-
terpretation of explicit contract in terms of implicit status. No
code of verbal statement can ever exhaust the shifting back-
ground of presupposed fact. What does alter for dominant in-
terests within each social system is the relative importance of
the contractual and customary factors in general conscious ex-
perience. This balance, fortunate or unfortunate, largely de-
pends on the type of social inheritance provided by that society.
But contract is a mode of expression for spontaneity. Otherwise
it is meaningless, a futile gesture of consciousness.

In the end nothing is effective except massively co-ordinated
inheritance. Sporadic spontaneity is composed of flashes mu-
tually thwarting each other. Ideas have to be sustained, dis-
entangled, diffused, and co-ordinated with the background.
Finally they pass into exemplification in action. The distinguish-
ing mark of modern civilization is the number of institutions
whose origin can be traced to the initial entertainment of some
idea. In the- ancient civilizations thought was mainly explana-
tory. It was only creative in respect to individual actions. But
the corporate actions preceded thought. The ancient Gods,
either as notions or as persons, did not create the thunderstorm,
they explained it. Jehovah did not create the Hebrew tribal
emotions, he explained them. He never made a covenant which
initiated Hebrew history; the notion of the covenant was an
explanatory idea. It was influential; but the idea arose as an
explanation of the tribal history. Nevertheless it intensified a
pre-existing fact. The Old Testament is on the verge of the
dividing line between ancient and modern. This watershed is
Hellenism. The difference is only one of proportion, of more
or less. But a sufficient change of proportion makes all the dif-
ference. In the last phase of ancient life there is a haunting feel-
ing that corporate actions ought to have originated from ideas.
Thus their historical imagination unconsciously imported types
of explanation of their past which were faintly relevant to their
own present: explanations fantastic, incredible, fit only for ex-
posure by scholars. It was the shadow of the future thrown back
onto the past.

FREEDOM

64

Returning to the economic side of life, in the ancient world
-there were economic transactions between tribes and between
■states, and there were also the economic activities of craftsmen,
merchants, and bankers. There was communal activity and indi-
vidual activity. Cicero’s financial worries are preserved for us
in his letters to Atticus. They are very analogous to Gibbon’s
letters to Holroyd, which are characteristic of educated Europe
in the eighteenth century. Certainly Cicero’s affairs were suffi-
ciently complex. It is not in that respect that the ancient world
fell short. It would be worth sacrificing a good deal of Latin
literature to know what Atticus thought of Cicero’s financial po-
sition. Even after two thousand years it is difficult not to enter-
tain a friendly anxiety on the subject. Perhaps as Cicero put his
head out of the litter he had been dreaming of bankruptcy,
when the sword of the soldier gave him death.

That ancient world is modern both in the physical facts which
await us, and in the ripples of anxiety arising from its social in-
tricacies. At that time the human mind was singularly powerful
for the generation of ideas. To the epoch between Plato and
Justinian, we can trace our philosophical ideas, our religious
ideas, our legal ideas, and the model of modern governmental
organization. We can recognize Pliny as he discusses whether
the parents should serve on the board of governors of the
Grammar School he had founded. Sidonius Apollinaris is an an-
ticipation of many New England gentlemen, ecclesiastic and
lay. But within that period the ferment of ideas had not per-
sisted for a sufficient time to transform society by a profusion
of corporations originated by explicit thought. In particular the
great commercial corporations awaited modern times, the Bank
of St. George at Genoa, the Bank of England, the great trad-
ing companies to India and the East. Atticus was a banker 3 but
he was not the president of a banking corporation. Private
wealth was deposited in pagan temples 5 but temples were cor-
porations devoted to the customary rites of religion. The state
taxes were farmed by private corporations of Roman capitalists.
Here we approach modern notions. Yet after all the fuhlicani
were engaged in performing one of the direct services of the
State. Their actions were communal and traditional with a tinge

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 65

of modern modes of incorporation. No doubt many anticipations
of modern commercial institutions can be found. Those times
lie within the modern world. But it was modern commerce in
its infancy. Indeed, the examples quoted of modern commercial
activity belong to an intermediate period, and only recently has
the influence of ideas produced its full economic effect. But
wherever ideas are effective, there is freedom.

VIII

Unfortunately the notion of freedom has been eviscerated by
the literary treatment devoted to it. Men of letters, artists in
symphonies of pictorial imagination, have staged the shock of
novel thought against tradition. The concept of freedom has
been narrowed to the picture of contemplative people shocking
their generation. When we think of freedom, we are apt to con-
fine ourselves to freedom of thought, freedom of the press,
freedom for religious opinions. Then the limitations to freedom
are conceived as wholly arising from the antagonisms of our
fellow-men. This is a thorough mistake. The massive habits of
physical nature, its iron laws, determine the scene for the suf-
ferings of men. Birth and death, heat, cold, hunger, separation,
disease, the general impracticability of purpose, all bring their
quota to imprison the souls of women and of men. Our experi-
ences do not keep step with our hopes. The Platonic Eros,
which is the soul stirring itself to life and motion, is maimed.
The essence of freedom is the practicability of purpose. Man-
kind has chiefly suffered from the frustration of its prevalent
purposes, even such as belong to the very definition of its
species. The literary exposition of freedom deals mainly with
the frills. The Greek myth was more to the point. Prometheus
did not bring to mankind freedom of the press. He procured
fire, which obediently to human purpose cooks and gives
warmth. In fact, freedom of action is a primary human need.
In modern thought, the expression of this truth has taken the
form of “the economic interpretation of history .’ 5

The fact that the “economic interpretation 55 is itself a novel
thought arising within the last sixty or seventy years illustrates

66 FREEDOM

an important sociological fact. The literary world through all
ages belonged mainly to the fortunate section of mankind whose
basic human wants have been amply satisfied. A few literary
men have been in want throughout their lives, many have occa-
sionally suffered. The fact shocks us. It is remembered because
it is rare. The fortunate classes are oblivious to the fact that
throughout the ages the masses of mankind have lived in con-
scious dread of such disaster — a drought, a wet summer, a bad
harvest, a cattle disease, a raid of pirates. Also the basic needs
when they are habitually satisfied cease to dominate thought.
Delicacies of taste displace the interest in fullness of stomach.
Thus the motives which stir the fortunate directing classes to
conscious activity have a long-range forecast and an esthetic
tinge — power, glory, safety in the distant future, forms of gov-
ernment, luxury, religion, excitement, dislike of strange ways,
contemplative curiosity, play. Mankind survived by evolving a
peculiar excitability whereby it quickly adapts itself to novel
circumstance. This instability is quickly diverted to some simple
form of the more abstract interests of the minority. The great
convulsions happen when the economic urge on the masses has
dovetailed with some simplified ideal end. Intellect and instinct
then combine, and some ancient social order passes away. But
the masses of the population are always there, requiring at least
a minimum of satisfaction, with their standard of life here
higher and there lower, also rising or falling. Thus, even when
the minority is dominant, the plain economic facts of life must
be the governing force in social development. Yet in general
the masses are intellectually quiescent, though the more ideal
ends of the minority, good and bad, permeate the masses, di-
recting policies according to the phantasies of the generations.
And the primary demand for freedom is to be found in the
general urge for the accomplishment of these general ends,
which are fusion of ideal and economic policies, making the
stuff of history. In so far as a population is dominated by some
general appetition, freedom presents no peculiar problem to
the statesman. The tribal actions are shaped inevitably, and
that group of mankind is pushed towards accomplishment or
frustration.

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 6j

In modern states there is a complex problem. There are
many types of character. Freedom means that within each type
the requisite co-ordination should be possible without the de-
struction of the general ends of the whole community. Indeed,
one general end is that these variously co-ordinated groups
should contribute to the complex pattern of community life,
each in virtue of its own peculiarity. In this way individuality
gains the effectiveness which issues from co-ordination, and
freedom obtains power necessary for its perfection.

This is the hope of the statesman, the solution which the long
course of history is patiently disclosing. But it is not the intui-
tion which has nerved men to surpass the limitations of man-
kind. After all, societies of primates, of animals, of life on the
earth’s surface, are transient details. There is a freedom lying
beyond circumstance, derived from the direct intuition that life
can be grounded upon its absorption in what is changeless amid
change. This is the freedom for which Plato was groping, the
freedom which Stoics and Christians obtained as the gift of
Hellenism. It is the freedom of that virtue directly derived
from the source of all harmony. For it is conditioned only by its
adequacy of understanding. And understanding has this quality
that, however it be led up to, it issues in the soul freely con-
forming its nature to the supremacy of insight. It is the recon-
ciliation of freedom with the compulsion of the truth. In this
sense the captive can be free, taking as his own the supreme in-
sight, the indwelling persuasion towards the harmony which is
the height of existence.

Thomas Mann

Lecturer in the Humanities y Princeton University

FREEDOM AND EQUALITY

M ODERN democracy is historically nothing more than
the form of sovereignty of the bourgeoisie, of the
tiers etat, which established its mercantile and indus-
trial world-dominion upon the ruins of feudalism. It was
achieved through revolution against the ancient forces of in-
equality and privilege, of spiritual as well as material oppres-
sion. It was achieved in alliance with the forces of enlightenment
and reason, which were felt as divinely beneficent, the destruc-
tion alike of bondage and of prejudice. This world-dominion
is one of freedom and at the same time one of peace, industry,
usefulness, and prosperity. Benjamin Constant writes in the year
1813, toward the end of the Napoleonic era: “After the history-
making epoch of war, we have arrived at the epoch of trade;
the former is barbaric impulse, the latter is civilized calcula-
tion; the new nations aim only at tranquillity and in addition
to this at wealth whose source is industry.”

It is curious how clearly this utterance of the French novelist
and political moralist reveals the sensitive function of the lit-
erary man to discern and to define the will of the times, the
changes and transitions of the spiritual, ethical, and social life.
He does this with a precision which is the result of acute powers
of perception and of nervous reaction, and he registers these
reactions even when outward circumstances, as in these days,
make them difficult of recognition to less penetrating eyes. It
was daring to declare, between Moscow and Waterloo, that the
war period had been replaced by one of trade and of rational

68

THOMAS MANN

69

welfare $ and yet the observation was, on the whole, strictly
accurate, especially since it was the function of the Napoleonic
wars to spread the revolution and its bourgeois ideas throughout
Europe.

Moreover, this particular author was not the only one to
entertain such timely ideas. Another French social critic ob-
served at the same time that money, cities, intellect, and trade
were now taking the place of landed property, castles, and the
honors of military life: he claimed that these changes defined
the new social order which had already affected the Council of
Monarchs and thereby reacted upon the people. The evolution
from feudalism to bourgeoisie and democracy could not be more
simply or more satisfactorily described. What was then a crit-
ical judgment based upon actual experience corresponds exactly
to our own sentiments when we try historically to determine
the new social spirit and the essence of democracy. The change
was clearly felt everywhere and occupied every alert and ob-
serving mentality — whether in the form of a protest or of a
hopeful agreement.

The attitude of Goethe toward the victorious democracy is
of the highest personal and objective interest. Living, as he did,
from the eighteenth century well into a decisive part of the
nineteenth century, he was a deeply disturbed spectator of the
governmental convulsions by which political forms spasmod-
ically adjusted themselves to new moral and social conditions.
His old age was troubled by the serious menace to the future
of culture which would result from the period of rapid com-
munication, of money and mass domination that he could see
approaching. But stronger or at least just as strong were his
sense of reality, his instinct to remain intensely alive, to absorb
life, and to incorporate it within his gigantic life-work to his
very last breath. Everybody knows the poetical tribute which he
paid to the “New World” — an expression which he used in its
double geographical and social meaning:

America, your life is better
Free from our old Europe’s faults.

You no ruined castles fetter
And no basalts.

FREEDOM

7 °

At the age of eighty his attention was directed especially
toward America, as is proven by the last parts of Wilhelm
Meister. The farseeing and eager sympathy of the old man.
for utopian plans and for great technical problems such as the
Panama Canal was simply magnificent. He discusses the latter
with a penetration and detailed knowledge as if it were more:
important to him than all the poetry in the world, and in the:
last analysis it actually was. The hopeful pleasure which he felt:
in the civilizing influence of technical progress and rapid meth-
ods of communication is not surprising in the author of Faust,.,
whose highest experience, toward the end, is the realization of
a utilitarian dream, the draining of a swamp — an idea that was;
peculiarly shocking to the narrow-minded, philosophical affec-
tations of the German public at that time. The elderly poet
delights in discussions of the possibilities of joining the Mex-
ican Ocean with the Pacific and the incalculable results of such,
an undertaking. He advises the United States to undertake the
idea and lets his imagination play with the vision of flourishing-
commercial cities which would gradually spring up along the
Pacific Coast. He could scarcely wait for the realization of all.
this, as well as the union of the Danube with the Rhine, which,
he conceded, would be an undertaking gigantic beyond one’s
fondest hopes. And there was a third idea — a really magnifi-
cent one; this time it was for the English — the Suez Canal.
“Oh,” he exclaims, “to see all this, it would certainly be worth
while to preserve on earth for another fifty years.” This tend-
ency toward the useful, toward world-unity, was a tendency
of the times, a democratic tendency. It finds additional expres-
sion in certain applications of liberal economic principles to the
life of the mind, as, for example, when the aged Goethe speaks
of a “free trade in ideas and feelings,” or when he explains that
national literature was no longer of great importance and that
the day of universal literature had come.

It is impossible not to admire this ready acceptance of life
under new conditions in a mentality that had matured to great-
ness in such a different world. But Goethe needed only to be
touched by the new spirit in order to express it in words in
which sensibility and sympathy can scarcely be distinguished.

THOMAS MANN

?!

It is hope that speaks in all these words, hope for the happi-
ness and peace of humanity, hope that borders on the utopian,
and which constitutes a surprising concession to the spirit of
the times on the part of an elderly poet who was fundamentally
pessimistic about the cultural future. For hope, yes even utopian-
ism, is really a characteristic of this young democracy which
combines in a most peculiar way industrialism with love of
humanity and common sense with faith in the immanence of
a golden age. In the French social prophecies of that time, we
read: “The Golden Age which a blind tradition has hitherto
placed in the past now lies before us.” This faith is the spir-
itual fruit of sudden freedom from clericalism and feudalism,
a rapid progress in the knowledge and control of nature, in
technical skill and in wealth-producing business activity. This
faith has decidedly moral and even religious associations j in
spite of its materialism and utilitarianism, it reveals traces of
spirituality. “Money, cities, spirit, and trade.” “Spirit” is the
“third word,” and it plays no unimportant role in the total
complex.

A general conviction prevails that after the disappearance
of the old war atmosphere and of the institutions that depend
upon the church, society must be based upon the two new forces,
science and industry , also, that scholars and industrialists must
henceforth divide the leadership of the world. Heine defends
these beliefs enthusiastically in his book on Conditions in France ,
evidently under the social and religious influence of Saint-Simon
who in 1825 had published his Opinions, litter air es, philoso -
phiques, et industrielles . Another of Saint-Simon’s books is
called very characteristically Nouveau Chris tianisme* His pupil
Dumoyer writes De la morale et de l y Industrie, and this combi-
nation of industry and morality is more typical and more fre-
quent than that of industry and science. Together with Auguste
Comte, this same Dumoyer publishes Le Producteur, a period-
ical “which is to help the progress of humanity, in science,
morality, and industry through the encouragement of the spirit
of co-operation.” The good will and the confidence in humanity
are almost overwhelmingly touching, and especially in this day
may well put us to shame. It was a utopianism of progress,

FREEDOM

7 2

practical-minded, to be sure, but basically very religious and
oriented toward spirituality. It mingled the material and the
sensual with the moral, and was dominated by ideas of peace,
work, fraternity, welfare.

This did not imply an individual and egotistical welfare so
much as a universal, social one. That precisely was the moral
element. Morality and the social life are synonyms in this
sphere; morality is the social spirit; scarcely anything but that.
And imperceptibly, without a break, and as if it were taken
for granted, we see here, in the first flowering of democratic
thought, the transition of democracy into socialism. It is excep-
tionally noteworthy and instructive to observe in the work of
Goethe’s old age that a trend toward socialism is an apparent
spiritual necessity in democratic morality. We find these sud-
den flashes of a collectivistic prophecy in the Wander jahre
where he deals, toward the end, with humanity’s victory over
its individualism and over its concept of individual culture, a
concept which Goethe, himself, had primarily created and
molded. Here the ideal of the highest personal development,
the highest cultivation and universality, are actually renounced,
and a period of specialization is proclaimed. The inadequacy of
the individual is revealed; only the sum total of humanity
completes the human; the individual becomes a function; the
concept of universality appears, the community.

Likewise in the system of Saint-Simon, the individual is of
value only to the extent that he contributes to the improve-
ment of the condition of the many, of the universality in which
he must lose himself. There will always be inequalities, says
Saint-Simon, but there must be none which God himself has
not ordained. It is the right of inheritance which creates rich
and poor, educated and ignorant, yes, good and bad individuals.
Let it be eliminated, and chance can no longer put the tools of
production into the hands of the lazy and the incapable. Every-
one will be rewarded according to his capacities; every capacity
according to its products; that is the formula of justice, main-
tains Saint-Simon, and the young socialists of 1830 are con-
vinced that it corresponds to the original will of God. Saint-
Simon’s thinking and willing are without doubt religiously

THOMAS MANN

73

determined, and are proclaimed by his contemporaries, them-
selves, as a religion, as “la religion Saint-Simonienne” “Reli-
gion,” declares Saint-Simon, “must lead society toward the great
goal of the quickest possible improvement of the good of the
greatest number.” That statement expresses Christian feeling,
but it is a developed Christianity, freed of dogma, and directed
toward the earth and toward community life. It is a Christian
humanism, that sees in humanity la fille de dieu> the daughter
of God, and desires that her future be glorious. Man should
consider and promote not only his physical life, according to
heathen practice, nor only his spiritual life, as in ascetic Chris-
tianity, but both in combination. He is not merely a traveler
and stranger here on earth, or a fallen angel who must keep
his eyes fixed on the Beyond, but he has come upon earth with
the vocation to complete the task of the gradual perfection of
all things. The reorganization of the whole world-order is
needed, but this must be achieved through efforts of the indi-
vidual and left to the progress of time.

It would be impossible, even now, to define the idea of Chris-
tian socialism or of social humanism more precisely. Above all,
a clear and exact appreciation is manifested of the independence
of occidental Christian ethics from church and dogma, that is,
of the capacity inherent in Christianity for spiritualization, which
constitutes its great superiority over the religions of the clas-
sical world. In ancient Rome, says the literature of the period,
the disintegration of state religion and pontifical office created
moral anarchy, brought about a confusion of contradictory and
unstable aspirations and philosophies which led to destruction.
The ancient peoples and their states were destroyed because
religion and politics were one and the same thing, and because
religion was bound to a rigid priestly hierarchy. To Christian
races, on the contrary, metamorphosis is vouchsafed instead of
destruction, for in Christianity spiritualization is innate 3 Chris-
tianity is, itself, conducive to the spiritual life and therefore
does not die with its dogmatic and pontifical forms, but remains
the living spirit of the people 3 and while it purifies the public
and cultural life, it, in turn, is stimulated through them toward
transfiguration of itself.

FREEDOM

74

It must be conceded that this insight into the immortality of
Christianity, due to its capacity for spiritualization, is a meri-
torious discovery of the young socialism which was born of
bourgeois democracy at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
It is this power which enables Christianity to survive its churches
and to remain, independent of them, the inspiration and the
foundation of occidental civilization. It is a fact of greatest im-
mediacy for us today, since it has become evident that Christian-
ity will be swept into the crisis of democracy which we are expe-
riencing. That is only logical, for democracy and Christianity
are closely bound together. They are united to such an extent
that democracy may be called the political expression of the
Christian feeling for life; and in the name of Christianity we
are defending nothing else than the ethical foundation of occi-
dental life, the spiritual unity of our cultural solidarity. Though
democracy itself, as a movement toward freedom, grew up in
an emancipating struggle’ against oppressive clericalism, this did
not prevent the new popular form of occidental society from
retaining its roots in Christianity. Thus it is clear that democracy
does not insist upon the preservation of the ecclesiastical-
pontifical forms of Christianity if they prove to be outworn
and obstructive. Democracy, itself, is an example and proof of
the spiritualizing influence of Christianity and its power of
sublimation, which make it possible for the postclassical social
structures that Christianity has shaped to replace destruction
with transformation. And we may conclude from the close rela-
tionship of democracy and Christianity not that they will dis-
appear together but that they will survive together.

The early evolution of a religiously tinged socialism from
early bourgeois democracy proves the close relationship of the
two, and their common root. This root, this common ground,
is Christianity. That there is also a contradiction and contrast
between them is undeniable. The contrast between democracy
and socialism is that of freedom and equality— a logical contra-
diction without doubt— for logically and absolutely considered,
freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as the indi-
vidual and society are mutually exclusive. Freedom is the creed
of the individual, but equality is a social need, and social equal-

THOMAS MANN

75

ity, obviously, limits the freedom of the individual* But logic
has not a final nor the highest validity for life, and in human
emotions, in human ethical requirements, freedom and equality
are not a real contradiction. With a slight change of emphasis,
democracy and socialism include both tendencies, for the contrast
between them is resolved in that which transcends and relates
both of them, in Christianity.

Christian humanity, moreover, has also combined the indi-
vidual and social principle in a way that is emotionally unassail-
able and wholly natural. The value and dignity which it bestows
upon the individual being, the human soul in its immediate
relationship to God, are not contradicted by the equality of all
before God. It is in the statute of human rights, this Christian
heritage of the great bourgeois revolution, that both principles,
the individualistic and the social, freedom and equality, are
combined and mutually justify each other. In democracy free-
dom predominates over equality. In socialism, equality prevails
— in the name and for the purpose of freedom. But at the same
time it cannot be denied that all socialism has a tendency to
exaggerate the mechanization and regimentation of society and
to sink the individual in the group, in a practical uniformity
and in mass movements. But if we consider what high and final
cultural and esthetic values are associated with individuality,
it is easy to understand the alarm which mentalities like Goethe
and Heine felt at the democratic transformation of the world
and its socialistic consequences, which they were very quick to
anticipate.

Goethe, the son of the eighteenth century, suffered so acutely
under the convulsions of the French Revolution that it nearly
cost him his talent and his productivity. For Heine, the social
revolution seemed the direct outcome of the bourgeois revolu-
tion, and with visionary clarity, with mingled despair and con-
sent, he saw the approach of communism — a world in which he
expected Heinrich Heine’s poetry would have no further use
than to serve as wrapping paper for the sausages of the prole-
tariat.

That the cultured person should fear the disappearance of
liberty and individual values in collectivity and socialistic equal-

FREEDOM

76

ity is readily comprehensible. It is, so to speak, democracy’s
fear of itself— a fear that plays no small part in the distress
and weakness from which the spiritual and moral position of
democracy is suffering today. Democracy is being shamelessly
exploited, exploited by the worst and lowest enemies of free-
dom — enemies that I need not name. They hope to make de-
mocracy “ripe for assault,” to use their own language, by per-
suading it that it is the forerunner of Bolshevism. For this reason
it may be the moment for a word of caution and defense.

Such fears would only be justified if freedom and equality
constituted an insuperable and irreconcilable contrast. But for
people of our feelings, determined as they are by our Christian
influences, this is not true. These feelings accept as necessarily
true that a human synthesis must be possible between limitation
and justice, freedom and equality, individual and society, the
person and the collectivity. Nor is this unreasonable. For reason
tells us that pure individualism and absolute freedom are just
as humanly impossible and contrary to culture as their liberty-
destroying opposite. There would be no hope for humanity if
it had a choice only between anarchy and that extreme socializa-
tion which destroys personality. But that is not the meaning
of a socialism that feels democracy as its native soil, and de-
mands an equalizing justice in the name of freedom; in other
words, a social democracy. Socialism implies socialization. And
this concept itself — the mere recognition of the fact that man
is a social being — amounts to a definition and limitation of free-
dom and the individual. It means an appreciation which, to be
sure, does not come easily to the individual proud of his special
cultivation, that a purely individualistic, purely personal and
spiritual humanity is incomplete and dangerous to culture. It
means also that political and social activities are expressions of
humanity; that it is not possible to separate them completely
from spiritual and cultural activities. Nor is it possible to devote
oneself to culture and declare that one is “not interested” in
politics. In a word, culture together with politics denote the
totality of the humane, which must be carefully distinguished
from totalitarian -politics in which one part, an ingredient or
segment of the humane, swallows up the whole and destroys

THOMAS MANN

77

freedom. The just and reasonable division of emphasis between
the individual and the social element in man, the limitation
of the political and social to their natural and necessary share
in humanity, culture, and life — that is freedom. When politics
becomes absolute and establishes a total dictatorship over every-
thing human, that is the end of freedom, and it is no less de-
structive of culture than anarchy. In the antihuman will toward
this political absolutism, fascism and communism meet.

It is possible to find differences of opinion between these
two, to make comparisons between their moral levels which will
always be to the disadvantage of fascism. The fact remains that
there is no difference between them in their dictatorial negation
of freedom $ and as far as communism is concerned, its essen-
tial contrast to what we call social democracy, to responsible
freedom, cannot be grasped too clearly nor emphasized too
strongly. But if it is a lie to declare social democracy the first
step toward communism, deception reaches its pinnacle when
fascism — and especially German National Socialism — pretends
to be a protection and a bulwark against communism. This is
deceptive propaganda to which actually a considerable part of
the middle classes have succumbed, at least for a while. I do not
know how much progress the appreciation of the deceitful
character of these claims has made — especially since certain very
recent experiences. But it cannot be denied that the sympathy
which fascist dictatorship aroused among the possessing classes
rested upon these claims, and that fascism owes most of its suc-
cesses, first in its own countries, then in the outside world, to
the fiction that the choice lay between fascism and communism.

We were told that we must cling to fascism, increase its
power; and even if fascism’s unbridled thirst for power should
endanger it, we must save it at every sacrifice in order to avoid
communism.

And yet the great body of middle-class citizens throughout
the world should be warned, above everything else, of the
horrible disappointment which awaits them if they succumb
to this deceptive propaganda — a deep disappointment which
the peoples that surrendered to fascism have already tasted.
It is entirely erroneous to assume that it is the function and

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intention of fascism, or of German National Socialism, to
protect private property and an individualistic economy. Espe-
cially in its economic policies, National Socialism is nothing
but Bolshevism; they are hostile brothers of whom the younger
has learned almost everything from the elder, Russian, brother.
There is no doubt— all signs point to it— that the National Social
Revolution which began as a radical movement to the right is
developing, ever more rapidly, toward the left, that is, toward
Bolshevism. Or rather, from right-wing Bolshevism it is on the
point of becoming left-wing Bolshevism. Therefore it is abso-
lutely certain that the expropriation of the Jews is only a prelude
to more comprehensive acts of this sort which will be wholly
free of any race ideology. And particularly if the concept of
Bolshevism is understood in its popular mythical interpretation
as the epitome of terror and raging destruction, no better pic-
ture of it can be imagined than that which was exhibited in the
German pogroms.

There the world was given a clear illustration of what Na-
tional Socialism really is: namely, the most radical, unrestrained,
and destructive revolution which the world has ever seen,
wholly unsuitable to serve as a rampart for middle-class con-
servatism or to be used by it for protective purposes. Indeed
the word revolution is actually too honorable to define this
phenomenon, for an invasion by the Huns would not be de-
scribed as a revolution. Revolutions usually contain some rela-
tionship to the idea of humanity, a faith, a will — however con-
fused — to progress and to bring about the improvement of
human society. They have as a rule some passionate relationship
to the Absolute and to the idea in the name of which they
perpetrate their deeds and misdeeds. Because of this faith, this
relationship and passion, and out of respect for them, humanity
has always shown a tendency to forgive revolutionary misdeeds.
It was inclined to overlook them, because of the ultimate good
and the high aspiration out of which the terror resulted. That
was the attitude toward the French Revolution, and again to-
ward the Russian proletarian revolution, or at least that was
the attitude when it began. But the misdeeds of the so-called
National Social Revolution are devoid of any human excuse,

THOMAS MANN

79

for it lacks every concern and every love for humanity or
for the idea of perfecting human society. It is a revolution
of empty force or, let us say, of spiritual nihilism. It is a revo-
lution such as has never existed, a revolution of absolute cyni-
cism without relationship to any kind of faith and filled with
lust for the degradation of men and of ideas. What it means
economically may be termed anarchy, and that may leave us
comparatively indifferent. But morally its purpose is extermina-
tion — the extermination of the foundations of civilization. The
final meaning of its anti-Semitism is not the foolish idea of the
racial purity of the German people but an assault upon Chris-
tianity itself. And even when it ridicules democracy, the con-
tempt is really aimed at Christianity in which democracy is
rooted and whose political expression it is. Freedom, truth,
justice, reason, human dignity — what is the source of these
ideas which are the support and mainstay of our existence and
without which our spiritual life would crumble? Whence do
they come if not from Christianity which has made them the
law of the world? A revolution which supplants every one of
these ideas with the law of force — that is the anti-Christ. And
yet this is the revolution in which the European middle classes
have seen their bulwark against communism for so long a time
that its successes approach a complete conquest of the world.

Democracy itself was once revolution. Today it is the greatest
conservative power upon earth, conservative in the deepest sense
of the word, because it is the defense and the maintenance of
the shamelessly menaced ethical foundations of the Occident.
But in order to do justice to this new responsibility, it must,
to a certain extent, return to its revolutionary state; it cannot
merely be> it must give battle. For without battle it will cease
to be. A passionate desire and will are slowly evolving out of
the necessity and the confusion of the moral retreat of our
times: the will to concentrate and to resist, the will to call a
halt, to command a halt, the will to defend civilization against
the corrupting onward march of force. The history of religion
speaks of the ecclesia the church militant, which pre-

ceded the ecclesia trmmfhanSy the church triumphant. Likewise
if democracy is to triumph, it must give battle, even though

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8o

it has long been weaned from the habit of combat. A militant
democracy is the need of the day, a democracy freed of all self-
doubt, a democracy that knows what it wants, namely, victory—
the victory of civilization over barbarism!

This victory will not be paid for too dearly with the sacrifice
of an exaggerated humanity, namely, that patience which en-
dureth all things— even the determination to terrorize human-
ity. Never can humanity permit itself such extreme patience;
least of all at a critical time of battle such as ours. Democracy’s
concept of freedom must never include the freedom to destroy
democracy; never must it give its deadly enemies freedom of
speech and of deed. If I say that, you will reply: That is the
very problem which freedom sets itself! No, I reply, its first
problem is self-preservation. But the very fact that there can
be a difference of opinion on this question is proof that freedom
is debatable, that it has become a problem. Or rather it has
become evident that freedom has always been a problem. The
crisis of democracy is, in truth, the crisis of freedom; and the
salvation of democracy from the hostile attack which threatens
it will only be possible through an honest solution of the prob-
lems of freedom.

Everyone who speaks of the conditions which freedom must
impose upon itself for its own sake, of a voluntary restriction
and a social self-discipline of freedom, must be prepared for
accusations of treachery toward freedom and democracy. And
yet I believe that the people who are the first and the most
vociferous with such reproaches are by no means the most valu-
able or the most unselfish friends of freedom. The solution of
the problem of freedom is made the more difficult because
there are three different attitudes toward freedom. It has real
enemies — and with them it is easy to deal. It has real friends —
and among them we would all like to be counted. But in be-
tween are its false friends, and they create disorder because,
consciously or unconsciously, they confuse the love of freedom
with an interest in freedom, with their particular interest. They
shout “Democracy is in danger” whenever freedom is advised
to place itself under a wholesome social discipline. And yet it
is a fact that democracy can only be saved by means of a liberty

THOMAS MANN 8 I

ripe with wisdom, that has outgrown the stage of unsocial liber-
tinism.

A personal interest in freedom is not a real love of freedom.
Otherwise, certain elements in the democracies of Europe
would not associate themselves with the archenemies of free-
dom and prepare the most terrible victories for them at the
expense of their own countries. If they had a genuinely disin-
terested love of freedom, they would prefer to accept a social
regulation of freedom, which alone can help freedom to survive
liberalism.

That these two, liberalism and freedom, are identical, and
that the one will stand or fall with the other, is a false pretense
of fascism— one of the many — but a particularly malicious one.
Let us not succumb to it. Liberalism, spiritually and econom-
ically, is the form which life took at a given period; it marked
the spirit of those times. And times changed. But freedom is
an immortal idea, which does not age with the spirit of the
times and vanish, and he who maintains that freedom will fall
with the forms of liberalism is not its friend. Freedom is not
served but harmed, and consciously or unconsciously we are
playing the game of its enemies, when we deny that freedom
today should assume severer and more binding social forms
than were appropriate in the laissez faire period of our fathers
and grandfathers.

We have tried to discover what democracy is: it is the human
adjustment between a logical contrast, the reconciliation of free-
dom and equality, of individual values and the demands of
society. This adjustment, however, is never completely and
finally attained; it remains a problem that humanity must solve
again and again. And we feel that today in the relationship of
freedom and equality, the center of gravity has moved toward
the side of equality and economic justice, away from the indi-
vidual and toward the social. Social democracy is now the order
of the day. If democracy is to hold its own, it must do so
through socially established freedom, which rescues the indi-
vidual values by friendly and willing concessions to equality;
through an economic justice which ties all of democracy’s chil-
dren closely to it. Only then can democracy resist the assault

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82

of a dehumanized spirit of violence, and fulfill its great con-
servative task, to preserve the Christian foundations of occi-
dental life, and to protect civilization against barbarism.

I am one who never expected in former years to be called
upon to make statements and efforts such as these. As a writer,
it is and always will be my natural function to reserve my
energies for that free service of humanity which we call art. It
is not by chance that we speak of the arts as “free”} for art is
the sphere of free thought, of free contemplation and formula-
tion. Politics, on the other hand, is the field of decision, of
opinion and volition. Is it not, therefore, significant and symp-
tomatic that today an artist whose native concern is the right,
the good and true, should feel obligated to apply these standards
to political and social questions: that he should seek to unite
his thoughts with the political will of the times because he feels
that he cannot fulfill his human responsibilities if he refuses to
do this? Is not this political endeavor of the spirit, inadequate
as it may be, an example of that voluntary limitation of freedom
for social purposes of which I have been speaking? And is not
this voluntary limitation a moral one?

I have discussed truth, justice, Christian civilization, de-
mocracy. In my purely esthetically determined youth, it
would never have occurred to me to deal in such terms. Today
I pronounce them with a wholly unexpected rapture. For the
position of the spirit has changed upon earth in a peculiar way.
Civilization is in retreat. A period of lawlessness and anarchy
reigns over public opinion. But for that very reason, paradox-
ical as it may be, the spirit has entered upon a moral epoch,
let us say an epoch of simplification and of humble-minded
distinctions between good and evil. Yes, we know once more
what is good and what is evil. Evil has been revealed to us
in such crassness and meanness that our eyes have opened to
the dignity and the simple beauty of the good. Once more we
have taken it to heart and deem it no slight to our intellectual
pride to confess it.

That, if you like, is a rejuvenation of the spirit, and I have
often thought that this period of spiritual rejuvenation and
simplification, this moral epoch, in which we have entered,

THOMAS MANN

83

might well be the great hour of America. That is what I really
meant to convey when I stated in other contexts that the preser-
vation and guidance of our occidental cultural heritage would
devolve upon America during these European dark ages. Be-
cause of its youth and moral vigor, because the soul of this
country is still close to the biblical and the monumental, Amer-
ica is attuned to the spiritual needs of the hour and seems called
to assert itself in the present situation with a natural authority.
To do this would not indicate presumption but an independ-
ence and a moral self-reliance which have become morally
necessary to this country and which could contribute to the
recovery of Europe. May America stand forth in an abandoned
and ethically leaderless world as the strong and unswerving
protector of the good and the godly in mankind. I salute Amer-
ica as a country that is conscious of its own human inadequacy
but knows what is good and what is evil; that despises force
and untruth; a country that perseveres in a faith which is sound
and utterly necessary to life — faith in goodness, in freedom and
truth, in justice and in peace.

Edward Samuel Corwin

Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University

LIBERTY AND JURIDICAL
RESTRAINT

I N the recent, but already famous, case of the National Labor
Relations Board v . The J ones-Laughlin Steel Corporation
the question at issue was the constitutionality of the Labor
Relations Act. The act requires that employers permit their
employees to organize into unions and that they treat the rep-
resentatives of such unions as the sole bargaining agents of
the members thereof. The Jones-Laughlin Corporation assailed
the statute as beyond the power of Congress to enact, one of
their principal contentions being that it deprived them of “lib-
erty” “without due process of law.” The Court rejected the con-
tention on the ground that labor had a “fundamental right” to
organize and bargain collectively, and that the act implemented
and gave effect to this “right,” or as we may properly translate
it, this “liberty.”

Here we have a vivid illustration of the opposition between
two fundamental conceptions of Liberty. By the one, which I
shall term Civil Liberty, is meant that liberty which one enjoys
because of the restraints which government imposes on one’s
fellows. By the other, which I shall term Constitutional Lib-
erty, is meant that liberty which is sometimes claimable under
a higher law against government itself. “Juridical restraint”
is, of course, a phase of the latter — the peculiarly American
phase. It exists when the courts of a country are authorized to
enforce their views of Constitutional Liberty against the acts of
the other chief organs of government, and especially against

EDWARD SAMUEL CORWIN 85

the acts of the legislative branch. It is, in brief, Constitutional
Liberty implemented by Judicial Review.

It requires little insight to perceive, or at least strongly to
guess, that the historical record of man’s devising in the field
of law and government presents far too vast a panorama to be
viewed from the angle of any single theory without distortion;
yet the instinct for logical consistency is so strong that once
one’s angle is chosen a general expectancy is created that it
will be adhered to. We in America, to judge from most of our
professions, have chosen that point of view from which the
human record composes itself into the picture labeled “De-
mocracy,” and from which any strong obstacle to legal change
would seem to be an anomaly. Nevertheless, as between the
concept of Civil Liberty and that of Constitutional Liberty,
as these terms have just been explained, American constitutional
thought has thus far clustered predominantly about the latter.
How has this come about? And what is the significance of the
recent change of attitude of the Supreme Court?— for change
it undoubtedly is. The following paper has for its purpose to
discuss both these questions, and largely in the terms of our
legal tradition.

The Western tradition of liberty in both the aspects of it
which are of interest to us takes its rise in Cicero’s attempt,
especially in his essay De Legibus , to render the Stoic doctrine
of Natural Law into juristic idiom. This doctrine comprised
two basic ideas, that of the inherent justice of the Universe and
that of man’s unique significance in it, since of all created things
man alone possesses reason and hence is able to comprehend the
order of Nature and so conform his conduct to it. Conversely,
thanks to his same divinely given attribute, all differences
between particular classes and races of men become of minor
import. In Cicero’s words, “There is no one thing so like or
so equal to another as in every instance is one man to another.”
Or as the Carlyles have summarized this aspect of Stoicism,
“There is only one possible definition for all mankind, reason
is common to all.”

Stoicism has been credited with laying the rational founda-

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tions for the two outstanding political aspirations of modem
times, that of Democracy and that of World Order, and justly
so, it would seem. Yet both of these Totalitarianism professes to
repudiate. Indeed, if the question be asked, what is the princi-
pal ideological difference between Totalitarianism and Democ-
racy, the answer is clear — Totalitarianism has cast aside the
doctrine of Natural Law.

But what conception of liberty does Cicero derive from Stoic
doctrine? Again much that he says anticipates modem issues —
indeed, the very issue with which this paper deals. His answer
is furnished in implication by his contention that the social na-
ture of man is the “true source of laws and rights,” and more
explicitly in such statements as the following: “The laws are
the foundation of the liberty which we enjoy — we are all the
law’s slaves that we may be free”; and again: “Nor is any-
thing more conformable to jus ” — by which he evidently means
both “right” and “a right” — “and to the order of nature than
is authority (imferium)”

In short, Cicero regards the laws which emanate from human
authority as being ordinarily man’s best reliance for freedom
and justice. At the same time, he is not blind to the fact that
there are occasions when this presumption must be abandoned.
“Not all things,” he writes, “are necessarily just which are
established by the civil laws and institutions of nations,” nor “is
justice identical with obedience to the written laws”; otherwise
all that would be necessary to make robbery, adultery, or falsi-
fication of wills right and just would be a vote of the multitude.
Furthermore, as counsel, Cicero did not hesitate now and again
to invoke “jus” in a client’s behalf against a statute — a sugges-
tion of judicial review to which Alexander Hamilton made
pertinent reference many centuries later.

Thus Cicero clearly envisaged both the conceptions of liberty
which are here under discussion. Ordinarily he regarded liberty
as resulting from the restraints which are imposed by human
authority; but he also glimpsed the kind of liberty which results
when human authority itself is restrained. That is to say, his
emphasis is upon Civil Liberty rather than Constitutional Lib-
erty — which brings us again to the question, whence did Amer-

EDWARD SAMUEL CORWIN 87

ican Constitutional Law derive its bias In favor of the latter?
Within the limitations of space here available only the main
elements of a complete explanation can be given, and they but
briefly.

1. The apostle of the Ciceronian tradition to the Teutonic
world which succeeded the Roman Empire was an English
cleric, John of Salisbury j and a casual examination of the
pages of John’s Polkraticus suffices to show the problem which
he has most at heart. Legislation as it was known in the days
of the later Republic and the Empire was at an end, while ruler-
ship was in the hands of military chieftains and essentially per-
sonal. That which took the place of law at this period and for
long afterward was immemorial custom, or what claimed to be
such ; and its relation to rulership was that of a curb rather than
an instrument. John’s endeavor accordingly is to equate so far
as possible rex with lex. Particularly illuminating are those
passages in which he endeavors to draw the teeth from certain
troublesome texts of the Digest and the Institutes which assert
that the Prince is “legibus solutus” and that “what the Prince
has willed has the force of law.” It is not true, he answers,
that the Prince is absolved from the obligations of the law “in
the sense that it is lawful for him to do unjust acts,” but only
in the sense that his character should guarantee his doing equity
“not through fear of the penalties of the law but through love
of justice” 5 and as to “the will of the Prince,” in respect of
public matters “he may not lawfully have any will of his own
apart from that which the law or equity enjoins, or the calcula-
tion of the common interest requires.” Indeed the very title rex
is derived from doing right, that is, acting in accordance with
law ( recte ).

The importance of all this is that in arguing thus John fore-
shadowed, even though he did not altogether succeed in formu-
lating it, the distinctive contribution of the Middle Ages to
modern political science, and especially to American political
science, the notion that all political authority is intrinsically
limited authority. Conceding the principle, however, an exigent
question of method arises : How are the limitations to be ascer-
tained and enforced? On the Continent this question went unan-

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88

swered, but in John’s own country, the mother country of our
institutions, it furnished the main stimulus to constitutional
development for centuries.

2. Although as a general thing historical parallels are more
of a hindrance than a help to real comprehension of the past,
when they are associated with the history of an idea the case is
often otherwise. For ideas have a life of their own, an internal
vigor which is capable of calling forth suitable institutions to
embody them, and a particular idea is apt to display a certain
constancy of preference in this respect in whatever environment
it occurs. Certain it is that the contribution of medieval Eng-
land to the American theory of liberty versus government shows
some interesting similarities to the strictly American phase of
the subject. There is to begin with a fundamental document,
Magna Charta, to symbolize the subordination of political
authority to law. Then ensues the slow absorption of this docu-
ment into judge-made law, a process which is attended by the
projection of a portion of the latter into the status of a higher
law of liberty. Finally this higher law of liberty becomes a
professional mystery — the arcana of Bench and Bar. And inci-
dentally there is a minor parallel between the roles played in
the two cases by commentators, albeit the greatest commentator
on American Constitutional Law, Thomas M. Cooley, stands
nearer to Coke than to Bracton in intention and method, as well
as chronologically.

There was a time within recent years when scholars took
much apparent delight in writing down the Great Charter, but
the sound residuum that remains from this often frothy criti-
cism is that Magna Carta was not at first all that Magna Charta
eventually became, and indeed became quite early. There is,
therefore, no need to quarrel with the contention that the
great Charter was originally “a feudal document,” even “a
reactionary document,” which was wrested from John by selfish
feudatories in the service of their own selfish “liberties.” For
however this may have been, the reissue of the Charter ten
years later in 1225 was contemporaneously described as conced-
ing their liberties “to people and to populace alike {tam fofulo
qmm flebi ),” while less than a half century after Runnymede

EDWARD SAMUEL CORWIN 89

we find Bracton describing the Charter as “Constitutio liber -
tatis ” a designation which merges all particular liberties into
one liberty. Nor was Bracton’s phrase merely casual or inad-
vertent, for other portions of his great work, the De Legibus et
Consuetudinibus Angliae } are shot through with John of Salis-
bury’s theory of inherently limited monarchical power, a doc-
trine which Bracton compressed into the famous axiom that
“the King ought to be under no man, but under God and the
law {sub Deo et lege) , for the law makes the King. 5 ’

There is, to be sure, one matter in respect of which consti-
tutional development in medieval England offers an appar-
ent contrast to constitutional development in the United States j
I mean the role which Parliament sustained throughout the
fourteenth century as defender in chief of Magna Charta. The
fact illustrates what was said earlier, that law was generally
thought of at this date as something existing independently of
human authority, and as therefore something to be declared,
not made — indeed, Magna Charta was itself just such a declara-
tion. Furthermore, the contrast tends to dissolve under closer
scrutiny. For notwithstanding the deceptively clear categories
of the doctrine of the Separation of Powers, American legisla-
tures have never lost their capacity to read the Constitution
with final authority as to the political rights of the citizen, and
even as to his private rights they were originally thought to
be — I use Madison’s words — “the safest guardians.”

And what is equally to the point as foreshadowing the par-
allel development of American constitutional law four cen-
turies later, the day came when Parliament’s guardianship
of Magna Charta yielded precedence for a period to the guar-
dianship of the ordinary courts over the Common Law. For
this there were several causes, two being of outstanding impor-
tance — the enfeeblement of Parliament through the almost com-
plete destruction of the old nobility in the Wars of the Roses,
and the immense enhancement of the prestige and social influ-
ence of the ordinary courts through the rise of a learned Bar,
of which the judges were the nucleus, though only the nucleus.

The spokesman of this period was Sir John Fortescue, who
had been Henry VPs Chief Justice and had followed his master

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90

into exile. In his nostalgic De Laudibus Legum AngUae Sir John
describes the laws of England as repelling that maxim of tyr-
anny, “quod frincip flacuit” which the laws of France admit,
and as declaring “in all cases ... in favor of liberty, the gift
of God to man in his creation.” Yet this divine donation, it
appears from other pages of the De Laudibus , is conferred indi-
rectly, through the agency of the judges, since the knowledge
which men in general can have of legal learning is, and can be,
but superficial, comparable with that which they have of “faith,
love, charity, the sacraments, and God’s commandments,” while
leaving “other mysteries in Divinity to those who preside in
the Church.” Nor, indeed, is the case of the ruler himself dif-
ferent from that of the generality of his subjects in this respect;
wherefore “the chancellor” — Sir John himself — is made to say:

My Prince, there will be no occasion for you to search into the
arcana of our laws with such tedious application and study. ... It
will not be convenient by severe study, or at the expense of the best
of your time, to pry into nice points of law: such matters may be left
to your judges and counsel . . . ; furthermore, you will better
pronounce judgment in the courts by others than in person, it being
not customary for the Kings of England to sit in court or pronounce
judgment themselves. ( Profrio ore nullus regum Angliae judicium
froferre usus est .)

I know very well the quickness of your apprehension and the for-
wardness of your parts; but for that expertness in the laws the
which is requisite for judges the studies of twenty years ( viginti an-
norum lucubrationes) barely suffice.

Thus the King is under the law, which only the judges know
—he is, in short, under the judges. Or in other words, English
liberty has its source in a professional, a craft mystery. At the
same time it is the source in turn of English prosperity, the
reason why Englishmen wear “good woolens,” have always
“great abundance” of “all sorts of flesh and fish,” and “drink
no water, unless at certain times, upon a religious score and by
way of doing penance.” One recalls certain idyllic pictures a
few years since of the American Way of Life and of its de-
pendence upon American Constitutional Liberty as conceived
by a certain section of the American Bar.

But the question remains, whether the judges were in a posi-

EDWARD SAMUEL CORWIN

91

tion to enforce their views of the Common Law against the
royal will, as Parliament long enforced its views of Magna
Charta. The answer is that from the early fourteenth century
on, royal acts and royal claims were constantly brought to the
test of the ordinary law before the ordinary courts, although
of course it must not be overlooked that the judges who decided
such matters were the King’s appointees and held their offices
at his pleasure. Nevertheless, in theory the law was often an
available recourse against the highest authority in the realm,
which is the very definition of liberty as a juridical restraint.

3. But how, by what agency, did ideas which attained fruition
in fifteenth-century England become the fountainhead of the
stream of American constitutionalism? The question is the
more intriguing from the fact that throughout 140 years of
the Tudor monarchy the system which the De Laudibus depicted
with such loving admiration was in complete abeyance, a con-
dition of affairs which is curiously symbolized by Shakespeare’s
failure in King John to so much as mention the Great Charter.
And this is only a part of the story, for when the medieval
conception of the relation of law to political authority did
finally emerge once more into the light of day early in the
seventeenth century it was primarily to serve the purposes of
political controversy, and to meet the challenge of the opposed
conception.

The Tudor monarchy made one outstanding contribution to
the existing stock of political concepts. It revived the idea, which
harks back to the popular assemblies of Greece and Rome, that
law can be made by human beings and that law so made can
be of the highest obligation. The greatest achievement of
the Tudors was the creation out-of-hand of a new ecclesiastical
constitution for the realm, which was effected mainly by resort
to the forms of Parliamentary enactment. The consequence of
this method for political thought is stated by Professor Mait-
land, in the following words:

Throughout the Middle Ages there was at least one limitation
set to temporal sovereignty; it had no power in spiritual matters.

. . . But now statutes have gone to the very root of religion, . . .
Thus statute has given the most conclusive proof of its power.

FREEDOM

92

Nor did this deduction escape contemporaries of the events
on which it is based. The words of Sir Thomas Smith in his
De Refublica Anglorum , which was published in 1589, are con-
clusive testimony in this connection:

The most high and absolute power of the realm of England con-
sisteth in the parliament . . . That which is done by this consent
is called firm, stable and sanctum , and is taken for law. The parlia-
ment abrogateth old laws, maketh new, giveth orders for things past
and for things hereafter to be followed, changeth rights and posses-
sions of private men, legitimateth bastards, established! forms of reli-
gion, altereth weights and measures, giveth forms of succession to
the crown, defined! of doubtful rights, whereof is no law already
made, appointeth subsidies, tailes, taxes, and impositions, giveth most
free pardons and absolutions, restore th in blood and name as the
highest court, condemned! or absolveth them whom the prince will
put to that trial. And to be short, all that ever the people of Rome
might do either in centuriatls comiins or tributis > the same may be
done by the parliament of England which representeth and hath the
power of the whole realm, both the head and body.

Certainly the author of this passage was not far from the
notion of a legally unlimited lawmaking authority, the idea
which Dicey tells us lies at the basis of the British Constitution
today.

So, I repeat the question: How did England’s medieval
constitution become the fountainhead of the American consti-
tutional tradition? The explanation is to be found in the at-
tempt of the first Stuarts to appropriate to the King alone the
powers which their predecessors had ventured to exercise only
in association with Parliament, and in the part played by Sir
Edward Coke, whose Institutes and Reforts were the chief
intellectual provender of the first generation of American law-
yers, in resisting this attempt. The extent to which Coke, whose
learning was unquestionably immense, embroidered his juristic
materials to suit his political purpose, has often been a matter
of controversy. Certain it is that the tradition he passed on did
not suffer in the process.

Coke’s war upon Stuart pretensions falls into two periods,
first, that of his two Chief Justiceships and, secondly, that of

EDWARD SAMUEL CORWIN 93

his membership of Parliament. In the former period we find
him seizing every opportunity to assert the doctrine that the
royal prerogative was a concept of the common law and hence
was subject to judicial delimitation 3 and in the famous case of
Dr. Bonham, decided in 1610, he advanced comparable doc-
trine with respect to the legislative power. “When,” he there
declared, “an act of Parliament is against common right and
reason ... the common law will control it and adjudge such
act to be void.” Nor can there be any doubt as to what Coke
meant here by “common right and reason.” He had, in fact,
explained to James I somewhat earlier that “reason” in the
sense of the common law meant not “natural reason but . . .
the artificial reason and judgment of the law . . . which re-
quires long study and experience before that a man can attain
to the cognizance of it.” It was, in short, the same professional
mystery that Fortescue had described to his Prince. The so-
called “dictum” in Bonham’s Case foreshadows, therefore, not
only judicial review of legislative acts, it foreshadows also
that indefinite type of judicial review which came to prevail
in this country about 1890 in reliance on the “due process of
law” clause. In the history of liberty as juridical restraint the
“dictum” is a landmark.

In 1616 Coke was removed as judge, the “dictum” in Bon-
ham’s Case furnishing one of the principal grounds of com-
plaint against him 3 and four years later he entered Parlia-
ment. Here his outstanding service was his leadership in the
House of Commons in the fight for the Petition of Right in
1628. The apprehensions which he had, perhaps, entertained
earlier that the Stuarts, like the Tudors before them, would
succeed in making Parliament a tool of the Crown, were now
dismissed. Indeed, it was altogether evident that if the King
was to be kept within bounds it must be by Parliament 3 and
in this persuasion Coke fell back upon the constitution of
Edward III, that is to say, upon Magna Charta and Parlia-
ment’s protective role in relation thereto. Likewise in the
Institutes , the first part of which was published this same
year of 1628, Magna Charta is described as “the fountain of
all the fundamental laws of the realm,” while Parliament,

FREEDOM

94

which is termed a the High Court of Parliament/ 5 is depicted
as a law-declaring rather than a lawmaking body.

Coke’s contribution to American constitutionalism is three-
fold. In the first place, his revival of Magna Charta is un-
doubtedly responsible in some measure for the American no-
tion that the Constitution ought to be embodied in a funda-
mental document . In the second place, the influence of his
sanctification of certain institutions and procedures of the com-
mon law, like the grand jury, the petit jury, the writ of habeas
corpus, and so on, is evidenced even today by the Bill of Rights
of the national as well as of most of the state constitutions.
In the third place, he clearly suggested judicial review of
statutes, and judicial review of indefinite scope. The indispen-
sability of the first two contributions to the final result is spec-
ulative, that of the third is certain — at least, as certain as such
things can ever be said to be.

4. Let us at this point cast a brief backward glance over
the argument thus far. We have been tracing the gradual con-
traction of the idea of Natural Law conceived as the informing
principle of a universal moral order to a principle of limitation
upon governmental action. Adopting the highly optimistic con-
ception of human nature which was propagated by Stoicism,
Cicero deduced therefrom the juristic notion of liberty in the
sense of individual freedom of action; and this he discovered
was of two sorts, that which results from the restraints which
authority imposes, and that which the individual is entitled
to claim as against authority when it lapses into injustice. Of
these two conceptions only the latter was of much use to the
early Middle Ages, which found in immemorial custom the
principal reliance against the boisterous violence of military
chieftains. And in medieval England the conception of a higher
law delimiting authority attained a still stricter definition and
corresponding solidity, being finally identified with certain prin-
ciples and institutions of the common law, to the cognizance
of which long years of study were requisite. Natural Law was
squeezed to the dimensions of a craft secret.

Luckily for the survival of the idea of a law which derives
its right to prevail because of its intrinsic merits rather than

EDWARD SAMUEL CORWIN 95

its authorship, the contracting process was at this moment ar-
rested for the time being. For as the quarrel between Parlia-
ment and the Stuarts passed from the stage of controversy to
open warfare, it became evident, especially to the King’s ene-
mies, that some higher authority than that of the past must be
invoked, first, because the system which had come down from
the past was being shattered, and secondly, because it was nec-
essary to address the nation at large in a language which laymen
as well as lawyers could understand. At this very period, as
it chanced, Hugo Grotius was endeavoring to resuscitate the
Ciceronian conception of Natural Law in order to make it the
basis of a system of international law 3 and from Holland, which
had become a refuge from Stuart wrath for English dissenters,
the revived conception passed to England, whence in due course
a particular version of it reached the American Colonies. I
refer to John Locke’s second Treatise on Civil Government of
1691, which in justifying one Revolution laid the ideological
groundwork for another.

Locke’s contribution to the American conception of Consti-
tutional Liberty — Liberty versus Government — is very great —
even greater perhaps than Coke’s, although when one studies
the Treatise somewhat carefully its teaching is found to con-
tain inconsistencies which are absent from Coke. In the first
place, as I have already indicated, Locke rendered viable once
more the notion of a law of transcendental obligation and hence
capable of controlling authority. To be sure, the idea did not
long retain its restored viability in Great Britain, for the com-
peting notion of legislative sovereignty had progressed much
too far 3 but the circumstances in which it found its way to Amer-
ica were more favorable to survival, as the result showed. In
the second place, the higher law which Locke promulgated in
his most explicit passages was almost exclusively a law of pri-
vate rights; so much so, indeed, that reading those passages
by themselves, one would be well warranted in declaring that
Locke had replaced the conception of Natural Law with one
of Natural Rights. Finally, there is one type of private rights
for which Locke manifests a very special concern, those which

FREEDOM

96

cluster about Property. Locke thus contributed definitely to
impart to American constitutional law its distinctive bias.

But there is another side to Locke’s thinking, one which
reveals much closer kinship to Cicero’s conception of Natural
Law. Following both Cicero and Grotius, Locke emphasizes the
sociable nature of man; and indeed rests human society on
this basis in the first instance, although politically organized so-
ciety he represents to be the outcome of Social Contract. Again,
he betrays no awareness of any such institution as judicial re-
view; to the contrary, private rights are dependent ordinarily
for their security on the supreme legislative power. At the
same time he asserts repeatedly that the grand objective of
legislative power is the realization of the Public Good; and
the same objective is set before the royal prerogative, which —
astonishingly enough — he says is entitled in the name of the
Public Good to override the laws in times of stress. One is
consequently left to draw the conclusion that Locke regarded
the rights of the individual which he so much stresses as being
usually the outcome of sound governmental policy — that his
real concern is the same as Cicero’s, namely, for Civil Liberty,
as I have termed it.

Lastly, the Treatise contains two extremely democratic impli-
cations. The first is that all political institutions exist simply by
the will of the majority. The other is that which is suggested
by his theory that Property is the result of labor. In Locke’s
own words:

Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all
men, yet every man has a “property” in his own “person.” This
nobody has any right to but himself. The “labour” of his body and
the “work” of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever,
then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left
it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something
that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him
removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this
labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of
other men. For this “labour” being the unquestionable property of
the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once
joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in com-
mon for others.

EDWARD SAMUEL CORWIN

97

Here in ovo Is the labor theory of value of modem Socialism.

In short, though it has always been regarded as the gospel
par excellence of individualism, and indeed of proprietarian
individualism, the Second Treatise on Government contains
many of the ingredients of a very different interpretation of
the doctrine of Natural Law.

5. The conveyance of the teachings of Coke and Locke into
the emergent stream of American constitutional ideology, and
the crystallization of the latter into the distinctive American
principle of juridical restraint, is a story the full telling of
which would require volumes. Here there is space for only
the outstanding features, and not all of those. The obvious
starting point is the controversy over American rights which
led to the Revolution, when the Colonial advocates turned
from a vain appeal to the British Constitution as they had
pieced it together from Coke to the more sweeping and more
easily comprehended gospel of Locke. Our interest, however,
is in the constructive rather than the destructive phase of the
Revolution j nor did the former lag behind the latter. Nearly
a month before the Continental Congress voted independence,
the first American constitutional convention, sitting at Williams-
burg, adopted a Bill of Rights which, mingling Cokian and
Lockian concepts with an important addition from the Esprit
des Lois of Montesquieu, is the prototype of all later redactions
both here and abroad of limitations upon government.

But while the Bill of Rights is the bridge which historically
joins American constitutionalism to its procreant tradition, it
was not deemed originally to Imply judicial review. In the
frameworks of government to which the first bills of rights were
affixed the legislature was overwhelmingly preponderant. This
did not, to be sure, mean that their authors accepted the notion
of legislative sovereignty, although the current influence of
Blackstone’s Commentaries undoubtedly tended in that direc-
tion; it meant rather that legislative majorities were regarded
at that date — to quote Madison again — as “the safest guardians
both of public good and private rights.” Indeed, even after
the idea of judicial review came to be generally accepted, its
advocates did not invariably regard bills of rights as affording

FREEDOM

98

a valid basis for it to operate upon, but only as “recommenda-
tory” to the legislature, “otherwise,” as John Marshall ex-
plained at the time, “many laws which are found convenient
would be unconstitutional.” In short, the principle of Constitu-
tional Liberty was accompanied in the first American Constitu-
tions, as it was in Locke’s Treatise y by the principle of legislative
supremacy.

The coalescence of the Bill of Rights with the Constitution
proper as a basis of judicial review— obviously an event of the
very first moment for the conception of liberty as juridical re-
straint — resulted from the cleavage of American society shortly
following the Revolution into a debtor and a creditor class,
and the perception which this development stimulated espe-
cially among the lawyers of the logical implications, or at any
rate, the logical possibilities , of the principle of the Separation
of Powers. Thus, with the State legislatures pretty generally
under the control of the debtor class, the proprietarian interest
and its professional spokesmen speedily developed the theory
that only the judicial branch could authoritatively declare the
meaning of the standing law, and hence of the Constitution,
and that the legislative branch was the organ of the will — not
to say the willfulness — of society, and hence was incapable from
the very nature of things of keeping that will within predeter-
mined bounds.

Nevertheless, the principle of legislative supremacy was by
no means to be exorcised from the State constitution at one
fell swoop; nor in fact has it been entirely so to this day. Con-
fining our present attention, however, to the period prior to
1850, we may say roughly that it witnessed the establishment
of a kind of working compromise between the idea of legisla-
tive supremacy and that of juridical restraint which, while it
handed over the ultimate delimitation of the property right
to the judiciary, still for the most part left the remainder of
the domain of interests covered by the Bill of Rights to legisla-
tive demarcation. And that this compromise proved at the time
a highly successful emollient of the democratic process can
scarcely be doubted. On the one hand, the easy availability of
free land left every American feeling that he had prosperity

EDWARD SAMUEL CORWIN

99

within his grasp and hence disposed to regard judicial solicitude
for vested rights sympathetically. On the other hand, the only
liberty which was much talked about at this period was political
liberty, and the whole trend of legislation favored its extension
and never came within judicial cognizance.

The ultimate breakdown of this compromise resulted from
two reform movements which in the late forties came to frui-
tion within the sphere of proprietarian interests. The first was
the movement to put married women in control of their own
property — a serious invasion of the common law rights of hus-
bands; the other was the movement to remove the protection
of the law from the liquor traffic. The battle came finally to be
joined over the legislative product of the latter movement, the
so-called “Prohibition Acts.” Initially the opponents of this
legislation appealed to the Lockian version of Natural Rights,
but gradually the argument was shifted to the “due process of
law,” or equivalent “law of the land” clause of the local bills
of rights. The outcome of the struggle was decidedly favorable
for the idea of Civil Liberty. In the majority of States adopting
it, Prohibition legislation was held to be within the “Police
Power,” which was defined as the power of the State to promote
the general welfare; to that power, it was held, proprietarian,
like all other interests, were subordinate. In New York alone
did the notion of the special sanctity of the property right pre-
vail, and it was held that legislative power was constitutionally
estopped from adopting measures on any justification whatso-
ever which went to the length of destroying property without
providing for the owner’s reimbursement. Such legislation was
not “due process of law.”

Meantime the contest between the conception of liberty as
Civil Liberty and of liberty as Constitutional Liberty was de-
veloping on a national scale in consequence of the crusade against
Slavery; and with the freeing of the Negroes and their investi-
ture with legal equality with their erstwhile owners, the former
conception met with its most resounding triumph in juristic his-
tory. The legislative monument of the period is the first section
of the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads:

100

FREEDOM

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject
to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of
the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any
law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of
the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any
person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

By the fifth section of the Amendment Congress was author-
ized to adopt appropriate legislation to enforce the above provi-
sions, Thus civil rights in the United States were put under
the protection and control of the national legislative power.
Fortunately or otherwise, the framers of the Amendment had
not reckoned with the tenacity of the contrary tradition.

Hardly was the Fourteenth Amendment enrolled as a part
of the Supreme Law of the Land than members of the Bar
began to urge upon the Court a conception of “due process of
law” which would have made it — to quote Justice Miller — “a
perpetual censor” upon all State legislation. The Court declined
the invitation and even scolded the lawyers for their temerity
— but it refused just the same to define “due process of law,”
preferring, it explained, to leave that to “the judicial process
of inclusion and exclusion” — that is, to its own future lucubra-
tions and those of counsel. Quite naturally the lawyers renewed
their endeavors with increasing insistence, and a variety of cir-
cumstances aided their cause.

For one thing, the language of the Amendment to the con-
trary notwithstanding, the American people were by no means
prepared at this date to turn over to Congress the entire busi-
ness of regulating civil rights, so that when by its decision in
the Civil Rights Cases in 1885 the Court reduced Congress’s
positive powers under the Amendment to a virtual nullity,
its action was generally applauded. It is true, of course, that
by this time the industrial and economic unification of the
country was already getting under way, and the process was
to become progressively accelerated with the passing years.
Popular perception, however, of the bearing of this fact on
the subject of civil rights was blunted by the rise at the same
time of what is best describable as a new doctrine of Natural

EDWARD SAMUEL CORWIN

IOI

Rights. Drawn about equally from the still youthful science
of Economics and the infant science of Biology, the new gospel
taught that national prosperity was best promoted by the unfet-
tered judgment of business men and that in the industrial and
commercial “struggle for existence 55 it was “the fittest 55 who
survived. It followed that government ought not to interfere
with business, and especially ought it not interfere with the
right of the successful employer to deal with his employees
as he saw proper. Indeed, it was implied — and sometimes bluntly
stated, as by Herbert Spencer — that legislative majorities rep-
resented little more than a conspiracy of the unfittest.

But, of course, before these teachings could be addressed to
the Court, they had to be translated into an acceptable legal
terminology, and in essaying this task the Bar turned to the
word “liberty 55 in the Fourteenth Amendment. Taking for
granted the correctness of the New York conception of “due
process of law 55 — a conception to which Judge Cooley’s famous
volume on Constitutional ‘Limitations now gave learned coun-
tenance and currency — they proceeded to urge its applicability
when “liberty 55 in the sense of “freedom of contract 55 was in-
volved. Taken up first by a powerful minority of the Court,
then by the high courts of certain of the States, then by legal
writers and publications, this doctrine had by the turn of the
century received the official imprimatur of the Court itself.
And the practical upshot was that within a few years the
Court — though not without many retreats and advances —
became the third house of every legislature in the country,
especially when legislation affecting the employer-employee
relationship was concerned. To that extent, the intended regime
of Civil Liberty of the Amendment had been converted into a
regime of Juridical Restraint.

So we return to our starting point — the Jones-Laughlin
Case. Projected against this background the Court’s decision
there takes on new significance. It ref resents the retirement of
the Court from its role of stiferlegislature touching economic
and, industrial relations . What precisely were the considerations
moving the Court to abandon a point of view which was forti-

FREEDOM

1 02

fied by precedents reaching back nearly half a century can only
be surmised; but it is highly probable that the Justices were
influenced in part by a new perception of the radical deficien-
cies of an ideology which established the teachings of laissez
fair e political economy as the supreme concern of the Consti-
tution.

Certain it is that liberty conceived primarily as juridical re-
straint is exposed to certain grave objections when the needs
of a modern society, and especially one organized on democratic
principles, are considered. Such an ideology rests, in the first
place, on the most superficial view of the nature of power, which
it identifies simply as political power, thus overlooking the
obvious fact that the possession of wealth may be just as potent
to control the lot and conduct of large numbers of persons.
Again, in the pursuit of some vague, undefined concept of “inde-
pendence** this ideology closes its eyes to the actual interde-
pendence of interests and individuals which today pervades
every phase of life, so that a strike in Wisconsin may mean that
babies in New York City have to starve. Likewise, it ignores
the number and importance of the services which a modem
government is called upon to render its constituents and the
cost which the smooth, unhindered performance of these must
often exact in terms of legal restrictions on private conduct. It
propounds, moreover, an utterly jejune conception of Natural
Rights, one which defies the teachings of modern psychology as
to the fundamental requirements of human nature and the
dangers which society courts when it fails to supply these in
one way or another. And this is not to mention the challenge
which the Totalitarian states throw down to Democracy in some
or all of these matters.

At the same time, I am far from saying that the conception
of Constitutional Liberty — of Liberty against Government— is
without validity or value any longer, or that judicial review
should be scrapped. Judicial review still has its uses, and impor-
tant ones. Especially does it present an admirable forum in
which to rationalize and clarify, to authenticate in terms of broad
principle, the determinations of legislative authority, and thus
to articulate them with the more durable elements of tradition.

EDWARD SAMUEL CORWIN

103

Nor should it escape attention that while retiring from the field
of economic legislation the Court has shown an even enhanced
concern to protect against hasty and prejudiced legislation the
citizen’s freedom to express his views — a right of vital impor-
tance for the maintenance of free institutions. Yet even such
rights, it is necessary to insist, must always depend for their
most complete and beneficial realization much more upon the
ordinary law as it comes from the legislature than upon the
extraordinary interventions of the Court. Freedom of speech
and press has frequently more to fear from private oppressors
than from the minions of government; conversely, in the close-
knit society of our times there are utterances which cannot
be tolerated on any scale without inviting social disintegration —
incitations to race hatred, for example — and this even though
the common law paid no attention to such utterances.

More and more, in short, we emerge into an era in which
we must expect the concept of liberty as Constitutional Liberty
to yield ground to Civil Liberty. “We are all slaves of the law
that we may be free . 77 1

1 In the preparation of much of this paper I have laid my articles on “The
‘Higher Law 5 Background of American Constitutional Law 55 under contribu-
tion, Harvard Law Review , Vol. XLII (1928-29), pp. 149 and 365 fF. 5 re-
printed in Selected Essays on Constitutional Law , Cambridge, 1938, Voi. I,
pp. 1-67.

James Truslow Adams

Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters ;
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

FREEDOM IN AMERICA

I T may be asked why we speak of the concept of freedom
in America. Is the term “freedom” not a universal, the
same semper et ubique ? Is there a special United States
brand? The answer is that there are innumerable brands. There
is a universal freedom in the abstract, but what most people
think of as “freedom,” and for which they may be willing to
fight and die, is made up of many concrete items, just as in the
long political history of England the concept of liberty grew
from the struggle for or against specific “liberties” in a tech-
nical legal sense. What men mean by freedom is the freedom
to do certain things or freedom from not having other things
done to them. What those things may be vary from nation to
nation and even from individual to individual.

We may illustrate the point simply by the old story of the
Englishman who found himself on occasion in a curtainless
shack on a ranch in the American West. Wishing to take a
bath he hung his undershirt at the window, to find it drawn
aside by an inquisitive cowboy who announced that he wanted
to see “what there was so d — d private going on in there.” Here
was freedom in the abstract and the concrete. Both men wanted
freedom, but the cowboy wanted to look where he chose, where-
as the Englishman wanted freedom from intrusion on his af-
fairs. Obviously these particular freedoms to and from could
not exist simultaneously in a society made up of these two men.
Unless they settled by blows they would have to decide in time

104

JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS 105

which freedom had the greater value. But in this oversimplified
case there is another point to note. Each man was led to his
assertion of freedom not only by personal character and predi-
lection but by environment and past history. On these would
largely depend the values of these conflicting freedoms for
each of them.

On a larger scale we see such conflicting ideas of freedom
at work in the nations today. We are largely the slaves of words,
and often fail to realize that the same word may have utterly
different connotations for different people. Because, for exam-
ple, the vast majority of Englishmen or Americans would feel
themselves unfree under the rule of a Mussolini, it would be
a great mistake to consider that the vast majority of Italians
must do so also. I believe that a large part of the Italian youth
feel themselves free in following II Duce blindly as their leader.
This unlocks all sorts of stimulating emotions, many of them
fine and among the oldest in the mental development of man.

Thomas Jefferson was one of the first political philosophers
to unloose himself from words and to think of government not
in abstract terms but as something that had no value in itself
but only as it was fitted to the people whom it was to serve. A
great believer in democracy for the America of his day he saw
that his democracy would not work in other nations then, nor
possibly in America under altered conditions. It was one of the
tragic failures of Woodrow Wilson , that he did not realize
that a government suited to one people could not be made
to work by another. The rapid decline from the postwar Ger-
man Republic to the Third Reich of Hitler is a case in point,
as was Wilson’s meddling in Mexico.

It may be that all or most people want to feel themselves
free to attain certain ends, but what those ends are differ almost
infinitely. Some may feel that they cannot live unless they have
a voice in their own government. Others may care nothing about
this provided they are free to go about their own private affairs
in an ordered State. Some may find release from inner strains
only in the fiercest individualism; others in throwing them-
selves into some cause or mass movement regardless of self.
Concepts of freedom, like those of government, would seem to

FREEDOM

106

have to spring from the deeds of a people and be adapted to
them.

What of our concept of freedom in America?

Life is not only action but reaction, not in the sense of going
backward but of struggling against something. I recall my father
used to say that in his long life he had never but twice voted
wholeheartedly for any man for President; that he had always
been placed in the position of having to vote against somebody.
Often the things we battle against are of more influence than
those we battle for. This I think is particularly true in devel-
oping the concept of freedom in an individual or a nation. The
particular freedom, or freedoms, which we desire depend
largely on our psychological make-up, the result to a great
extent of heredity. Our awareness of their value to us as indi-
viduals depends also largely on whether we enjoy them freely
or are being, or have been, denied them; in other words our
present social and political environment on the one hand and
history on the other.

The combinations of all of these, as I have said, vary widely.
The American combination has been in many ways unique. It
is true that the national period saw tens of millions of immi-
grants with their native-born children, from lands whose char-
acter and past were different from those of Britain. But in the
formative colonial period, when our character and traditions
were being set, it was almost wholly by those from England, the
country which has had the longest and sturdiest training in
political self-government. There were even then many Scotch
and Celtic Irish as well as Germans, but the predominating in-
fluences were English. In the light of what I have said above
this was of immense importance in determining the colonial
American ideas of freedom. It was the English concept of free-
dom, with its parliamentary institutions, its trial by jury, its
common law, its political representation, its ideas on taxation,
and others, crude as many of these 'were at the time, which
determined primarily the concept of freedom in America. But
there were other factors at work. ,

Most of these have been written about repeatedly, notably
the frontier. In a new country, where a man could soon find

JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS IOJ

land and a living for himself, labor was scarce even when not
wholly unattainable. When men of social standing and some
wealth emigrated to America they found themselves stripped
by circumstances, and not by social theory, of most of the privi-
leges which wealth and family had brought them in the Old
World. We need not repeat here what has ’so often been said
of the democratizing and leveling influences of the frontier.

It must be recalled, however, that America has not had one
but a multitude of frontiers across its three thousand miles
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf to Canada,
during the periods of its successive expansions. Had there been
only the first frontier, that would in time have become settled,
as it did to a great extent along the Atlantic seaboard before
the Appalachians were crossed, and a type of European life
developed, even if provincial. But the frontiers, until a gen-
eration ago, were a continuing influence actively at work on
those who lived on them. Life on all of them developed a new
concept of freedom — the freedom for a man to get ahead as
fast as his own brawn and brain would permit, almost untram-
meled by any laws or government. It was an extraordinarily
exhilarating freedom, this sense that nothing need hold you
back but yourself if you were strong, energetic, and ambitious,
with a new world to conquer if you could. Riches or social and
political advancement were achieved by only a small number
among them all, but the chance seemed to be there, and it came
to be universally felt that the right, at least, to get ahead, if
you could, was part of American freedom. Governmental inter-
ference was resented, though from the beginning governmental
aid, local, state, or national,' was invoked when it promised to
help the individual along. American freedom in this respect,
however, meant a government for the benefit of the individual
citizen and never that the citizen existed for the benefit of the
government or a mythical entity called “the State.”

The fact, moreover, that the colonies were three thousand
miles away from the mother country, and that central control
was so far removed, tended to emphasize the English con-
cepts of freedoms, such as freedom of press and speech, self-
government, and others which all appear in our original Con-

FREEDOM

ioB

stitution and the Bill of Rights. If an Englishman in England
resented unjust taxation, unjust laws or judicial decisions, so,
infinitely more, did an Englishman in America resent such
things when the result of acts of men far remote. Before the
Revolution the Americans in some instances tasted of injus-
tice. The result was that the American concept of freedom
included by inheritance the whole of the English, emphasized,
broadened, and in some details altered. We may note, for
example, that as the Executive appeared in colonial govern-
ments in the form only of the Royal Governor for the most
part, the colonial American came to hate and mistrust the execu-
tive branch of government w r hile giving excessive confidence
to the Legislative, in which he had hitherto found his only de-
fense. It is a good example of reaction against a condition, as
was our adoption of the congressional instead of the parlia-
mentary form of self-government, though this was to prevent
the later development, as in England, of responsible and cabi-
net government, which brings the electorate much closer to
power than in America.

The Americans had also suffered, as they believed, from
unjust searches and seizures, so, as another case of reaction,
they wove into the American concept of freedom a guarantee
against such acts some half century before the English them-
selves did. Also, a considerable number of immigrants — such
as the Dissenters in New England, the Quakers in Pennsyl-
vania, the Roman Catholics in Maryland — had come here
to escape from religious persecution in England and other Old
World countries. Religious freedom was far, for a while, from
being established in each colony, but gradually the great variety
of religions in neighboring, or the same, colonies, brought about
a feeling — both as reaction against European persecution and
as a matter of plain example in America — that the American
concept of freedom should also include complete freedom of
religious thought and worship.

These and other aspects of the American concept as devel-
oped from history, character, reactions, and the circumstances
of the new environment, have been immensely reinforced by
the fact that of the millions who have come to us from lands

JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS IO9

in no way connected with the English tradition of freedom,
practically all have come to escape from some form of oppres-
sion in their native countries — social, political, religious, or
economic. They have wanted to escape barriers of one sort
or another which prevented them from being, doing, or believ-
ing what they wished. They enriched American life in many
ways, but perhaps more in their passionate devotion to the
concept of freedom as it has developed here than in any other
way. That concept is found not only in the Constitution and
the Bill of Rights. Those simply give the legal foundation for
a whole way of life which embodies the American brand of the
idea of freedom. It has been noticeable in folkways, in political
contests, sometimes in violence, and perhaps it could be summed
up in the belief in the inherent right to make what you can
of yourself in every way, without being told what to think,
do, or say.

What of the present situation? We began this article by
pointing to the necessity of making choices as to sorts of free-
doms wanted. What are Americans likely to want in the future?
It is perhaps one of the great questions of today not only for
ourselves but for the world. We have seen that the idea of
freedom as a universal does not necessarily indicate what a
person or nation may consider as desirable freedoms in the
concrete.

One of the chief contests in the world of this century is
between freedom as security and freedom as adventure. Amer-
icans hitherto have preferred the latter, with all the incidental
freedoms of speech, press, religion, and so on which have been
integrated with the fundamental one chosen. Conditions on
which Jefferson laid so much stress have changed. Free land
has not lasted, as he expected when he made the Louisiana
Purchase, for a thousand years. The frontier is closed. The
statement of a Harvard professor that because there are still
abandoned chicken farms and cheap land in northern New
England there is still a frontier fails wholly to understand the
psychology of a frontier. We are now a great industrial nation
of a wholly different type from the America in which the
American concept of freedom had its genesis and growth. Jef-

I 10

FREEDOM

ferson thought democracy and our ideals of liberty would fail
when our population became “piled on each other” as in the
Europe he knew in his time. Economic changes in many lands
have wrought corresponding changes in what men consider
freedom. The freedom now desired by many is not freedom to
do and dare but freedom from care and worry, with the prom-
ise of a safe though dull and mediocre private existence if
tinged with the emotion of a mass movement, in the name of
race or some ism.

We may ask, though it leads only to further questions,
whether security (if it could be attained) or risk, danger, and
personal freedom will tend most to progress. In the sense in
which we have, frequently thoughtlessly, considered progress,
there seems to be no doubt of the answer. The effort to attain
a completely mediocre security can lead only to the totalitarian
state, which, as it progresses from one step seemingly inevitably
necessary to the next, means the suppression of all free thought,
speech, press, and even of all contact with the news of the out-
side world. We need not look far for examples of what happens.
The Germans at the moment are cut off, under pain of death,
from trying to learn what other peoples are thinking and doing.
The doors to the Russian mind are locked on both sides.
Progress, intellectual, spiritual, and scientific, is impossible
under such conditions, which may spread like a blight over
other parts of modern civilization.

But here we plumb deeper depths of our topic. We have to
define terms and estimate values. Without freedom there can-
not be progress, but what is progress? Is what we think of as
progress, and not mere change, the same for all peoples? Evi-
dently not. Consider what some highly intelligent and adaptable
peoples, such as the Japanese, have made of what the West
calls progress. By adopting the ideas which have come from
the Western freedom of thought, speech, and press, are the
Japanese a better human breed than they were in 1700? What
has “progress” done to the formerly populous and happy peo-
ples of the Polynesian islands? Is “progress” a value for all
peoples? If not, then the freedoms which lead to what we

JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS I I I

think of as progress lose the particular sanction of helping
progress.

On the other hand, it seems to me that, just as there is a
general idea which is valid of freedom, as contrasted with par-
ticular freedoms, there is also a general idea of progress. The
original cells in the primordial ooze which gradually devel-
oped into man progressed according to our ideas. What we call
man has gradually risen in esthetic, intellectual, and moral
stature. Whether there are points beyond which races, like indi-
viduals, cannot continue is aside from the argument. Man as
man is something much more valuable in our eyes now than
what he started from. Without freedom to develop, he could
not have developed. With different kinds of freedom he has
developed in different ways and up to different levels.

Personally I believe still in the American concept of free-
dom, but that has come from many factors working together,
some of which have now changed, as I have tried to indicate.
The devotion to a particular kind of freedom depends largely
on circumstance and environment. Freedom to do one thing
may block the freedom to do some other thing. What things
may we want in the future? Mere prating about freedom will
get us nowhere. Freedom for what? Does the farmer want
freedom from care, anxiety, and thought — an assumed security
— at the cost of being told at every turn what he must or must
not do, or does he prefer the freedom to do as he pleases at
the risk of failure, the freedom, as the old saying is, of “going
to hell in his own way”? If concepts of freedom depend largely
on circumstances past and present, have we sufficient idea of
what sort of freedom we want and sufficient willingness to make
sacrifices of one freedom In favor of another to try to mold
our life and conditions to bring about the desire for one sort
of freedom rather than another? If conditions, particularly eco-
nomic, should alter sufficiently, it might be that we would
come to desire a new set of freedoms— in the ideal if not the
reality — from those which have hitherto made the American
concept of freedom. Do we care enough about the old concept
to try to alter the conditions so that they may still breed the
old concept or will we drift into a new sort of society, as many

I 12

FREEDOM

other nations have done, which will breed a new concept? What
do we care about most?

The concept of freedom comes down, in the final analysis,
it seems to me, to what are the deepest and most abiding needs
of man. What, for him, are the real values in life? Does he
want to become, as many seem to wish today, a stall-fed domes-
ticated brute, helpless not only to progress but even to fend
for himself in the world without the supervising care of an
owner or master 5 or does he still wish to fight his own way
upward and take the chances of falling? It has been said that
eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, but eternal anxiety is
also the lot of the free man.

The question of freedom is generally considered political but
it is in reality religious. In many countries it has been largely
because the inhabitants have lost the philosophy of life and the
scale of values that their religions gave them in the old days
that they have also been willing to give up such liberties as they
formerly possessed, though the liberties, like the religions, may
have differed widely. The question of what type of freedom we
want, and in what departments of our life, is twin brother to
the old question in the Presbyterian catechism, “what is the
chief end of man?” Until we can answer that we cannot decide
what type of freedom we desire. If man is merely of the same
order as an ant, bee, or wasp, we might well try to emulate
their highly efficient order of social life. Through the ages there
have always been men who have fervently believed they were
something different from the most intelligent and highly or-
ganized animals. There seems to be something in man, call it
what you will, which makes him insistent on taking chances and
striking out for himself. There has been something which has
made him demand freedom. There are some freedoms which
lead him upward and some which lead him downward into the
animal class again. I have tried to show that which sort he
chooses depends on much beside mere abstract thought. America
has had perhaps the widest concept of freedom of any nation
but if that concept is to last we must, in a fast-changing world,
try to make the sacrifices and alterations which will continue the
conditions, even in a different form, which will give that con-

JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS I I 3

cept ever renewed birth. The American concept of freedom has
not been an abstraction. It has grown from the circumstances,
needs, aspirations, and beating hearts of innumerable human
beings of all races, creeds, and classes, under conditions which
promised opportunity. If we close the doors to opportunity and
advancement, will the majority still desire the same form of
freedom? And if they should not, what will happen to the mi-
nority which has always carried mankind upward?

Hu Shih

Former Professor of Philosophy , National University of Peking ;
Chinese Ambassador to the United States

THE MODERNIZATION OF CHINA
AND JAPAN

A COMPARATIVE STUDY IN CULTURAL CONFLICT
AND A CONSIDERATION OF FREEDOM

TjT N recent years I have published some of my reflections on
I the modernization of Japan and China. What I am now
JL going to state is a summary and restatement of what I
have been thinking on this fascinating subject during these
years.

I

First of all, we must state the problem of our inquiry. What
special aspect of the modernization of China and Japan arouses
our curiosity and requires our study and explanation?

Generally speaking, there are two aspects of the question that
have puzzled the outside world and demanded some expla-
nation.

For many decades, down to very recent years, the question
often asked was: Why was Japan so successful in her task of
modernization, and why was China so unsuccessful? That is the
first aspect of the question, which has called forth many ex-
planations.

But in recent years, the problem has radically changed. After
almost a century of hesitation and resistance, China has emerged
as a modern nation, not sufficiently westernized (it is true) in
her material aspects, but fully modern in her outlook on life
and feeling completely at home in the modern world. On the

H4

HU SHIH

XI5

other hand, Japan, after seventy years of apparently rapid
modernization, is suddenly discovered by the outside world as
having never been transformed in all the fundamental aspects
of her national life. Professor G. C. Allen, one of the most
sympathetic interpreters of Japan, said: “If the changes in some
of the aspects of her [Japan’s] life have been far-reaching, the
persistence of the traditional in other aspects is equally remark-
able. . . . The contrasts between these innovations and the
solid core of ancient habit are as striking as ever they were.”
Professor Emil Lederer and Emy Lederer-Seidler, in their
joint work on Jafan in Transition , another most sympathetic
interpretation of Japanese life, have dwelt on the most strange
phenomenon in Japan, namely, her “immunity to the dialectic
play of deep-lying evolutionary forces,” her being “devoid of
dialectic and dynamic” and her ancient civilization “offering
strong resistance to the facile assimilation of foreign elements.”

In short, the new problem is just the opposite of the older
puzzle. It is: Why has China at last succeeded in overthrowing
her old civilization and in achieving a Chinese Renaissance?
And why has Japan, after seven decades of extraordinarily suc-
cessful modernization, yet failed to break up her “solid core of
ancient habit”? That is the second aspect of the problem.

Any theory that attempts to explain the first set of questions
must also explain satisfactorily the second set of questions. And
vice versa.

II

In 1933, I was trying to solve the first set of puzzles: Why
and how has Japan succeeded, and China failed, to achieve a
speedy and orderly cultural readjustment and bring about the
modernization necessary for national survival in the new world?
The explanation I offered then was that China and Japan had
been going through two distinct types of cultural response. The
modernization in Japan I described as the type of cultural trans-
formation under centralized control, made possible by the exist-
ence of a powerful ruling class — the feudal militaristic caste —
from which came the leaders of the Reformation who not only
decided for the nation what to change and what not to change,

FREEDOM

1 16

but who also had the political power to carry out their decisions.
On the other hand, I pointed out, China, because of the non-
existence of a ruling class and because of the thoroughly democ-
ratized social structure, could only go through the slow and
often wasteful process of cultural transformation through the
gradual and diffused penetration and assimilation of ideas and
practices, usually initiating from a few individuals, slowly win-
ning a following, and finally achieving significant changes when
a sufficient number of people are convinced of their superior
reasonableness, convenience, or efficacy.

The advantages of the Japanese type of modernization under
the centralized control of a ruling class are easy to see. It is
orderly, economical, continuous, stable, and effective. But, I
point out, “it is not without very important disadvantages. The
Japanese leaders undertook this rapid transformation at so early
a time that even the most farsighted of them could only see
and understand certain superficial phases of the Western civ-
ilization. Many other phases have escaped their attention. And,
in their anxiety to preserve their national heritage and to
strengthen the hold of the State and the dynasty over the
people, they have carefully protected a great many elements of
the traditional Japan from the contact and contagion of the new
civilization. . . . Much of the traditional medieval culture is
artificially protected by a strong shell of militant modernity.
Much that is preserved is of great beauty and permanent value ;
but not a little of it is primitive and pregnant with grave dan-
gers of volcanic eruption.”

The disadvantages of the Chinese type of cultural changes
through gradual diffusion and penetration are numerous: they
are slow, sporadic, and often wasteful, because much undermin-
ing and erosion are necessary before anything can be changed.

But they have also undeniable advantages. They are volun-
tary. From the lipstick to the literary revolution, from the
footwear to the overthrow of the monarchy, all has been volun-
tary and in a broad sense “reasoned.” Nothing in China is too
sacred to be protected from the contact and contagion of the in-
vading civilization of the West. And no man, nor any class, is

HU SHIH

1

powerful enough to protect any institution from this contact and
change. In short, this process of long exposure and slow per-
meation often results in cultural changes which are both funda-
mental and permanent.

Ill

This, in general, was my theory regarding the modernization
of China and Japan. Japan was modernized under the power-
ful leadership and control of a ruling class, and China, because
of the nonexistence of such control from above, was modernized
through the long process of free contact, gradual diffusion, and
voluntary following.

We may ask, Can this theory satisfactorily explain all the
four phases of our main inquiry? Can it explain the marvelously
rapid westernization of Japan and at the same time the un-
changing solid core of medieval Japan? Can it explain both the
long failures and the recent successes in China’s modernization?
I think not only that it can, but that it is the only hypothesis
which can satisfactorily resolve all the apparent contradictions
of the problem.

According to my theory, the early and rapid successes of the
Meiji Reformation were brought about by the effective leader-
ship and powerful control of the ruling class, which happened
to coincide with the militaristic class of feudal Japan and which
naturally was most anxious and at the same time best fitted to
undertake the adoption of the Western armaments and methods
of warfare. As Professor Lederer has pointed out, “It could
hardly be foreseen at this early stage that in this case one step
leads inexorably to a second.” “Since a modern military state is
possible only on condition that it is an industrialized state,
Japan had to develop in that direction. But industrialization, by
reason of the economic interrelationship between various types
of production, means also the development of branches of in-
dustry which are not essential to the conduct of war. . . . Just
as militarism reaches beyond itself into industry, so the techno-
logical system of industrialism has far-reaching implications for
the social system.” The leaders of Japanese westernization
started out with the desire to adopt Western militarism and

FREEDOM

I 18

have thereby brought about what Professor Lederer calls the
“militaristic industrial system.”

Of all the non-European countries with which the European
civilization has come into contact , Japan is the only nation that
has successfully learned and mastered that one phase of the
occidental civilization which is most coveted by all races,
namely, its militaristic phase. Japan has succeeded where all
these non-European countries have invariably failed. This his-
torical mystery can only be explained by the fact that no other
non-European country was so favored with the existence of a
militaristic caste which has been the governing class of the coun-
try for over twelve centuries.

But this militaristic caste was not an enlightened or intellec-
tual class. Its leaders were courageous, pragmatic, patriotic, and
in some cases statesmanlike. But they were limited in their vi-
sions and in their understanding of the new civilization that
had knocked at their shores. They thought, just as Lafcadio
Hearn thought, that they could build up a Western war ma-
chine which should be made to serve as a protective wall behind
which all the traditional values of Tokugawa Japan should be
preserved unaltered.

Unfortunately for Japan and for the world, the military
successes of Japan against Russia and China tended to vindicate
these narrow- visioned leaders. The result has been an effective
artificial protection and solidification of the traditional culture
of medieval Japan against the “dangerous” contact and influ-
ence of the new ideas and practices of the ever-changing world.
By the use of the modern means of rigidly controlled education,
propaganda, and censorship, and by the use of the peculiarly
Japanese methods of inculcating the cult of emperor-worship,
Japan has succeeded in reinforcing and consolidating the “solid
core” of unchanging medieval culture left over from the 250
years of Tokugawa isolation. It was the same centralized lead-
ership and control which made possible the rapid and successful
changes in militarization and industrialization and which has
also deliberately protected and solidified the traditional values
and made them “immune to the dialectic play of deep-lying
evolutionary forces.”

HU SHIH

119

The same theory also explains the history of modernization
in China. The early failures in the Chinese attempts at west-
ernization were almost entirely due to the absence of the factors
which have made the Japanese Meiji Reformation a success.
The Chinese leaders, too, wanted to adopt the Western arma-
ments and methods of warfare and to build up the new indus-
tries. Their slogan was “Fu Ts’iang” (Wealth and Strength).
But there was in China neither the militaristic tradition, nor an
effective and powerful governing class to undertake the leader-
ship and direction in such gigantic enterprises. China had come
out of feudalism at least twenty-one centuries ago; the social
structure had been thoroughly democratized; and governmen-
tal policy, religion, philosophy, literature, and social usage had
combined to condemn militarism and despise the soldier.
Whereas the Samurai was the most highly esteemed class in
Japan, the soldier ranked the lowest in the Chinese social scale.
Therefore the new Chinese army and the new Chinese navy of
the eighties and nineties of the last century were doomed to
failure. With the destruction of the Chinese navy in 1894-95,
all the new industries — the shipyard, the merchant marine, the
government-operated iron and steel industry— which were to
feed and support the new war machine, gradually came to
nought. The government and the dynasty were thus discredited
in their early efforts in modernization. After the failure of the
reforms of 1898 and the tragedy of the Boxer Uprising of 1900,
the discrediting of the dynasty and the government was com-
plete. From that time on, China’s main endeavor was to destroy
that center of ignorance and reactionism — the monarchy and its
paraphernalia — and then to build up a new center of political
authority and leadership.

Thus, while Japan’s first successes in westernization were
achieved under the leadership and control of her feudal-mili-
taristic class, China has had to spend three or four decades in
the effort of first removing the monarchy and later destroying
the newly arisen militarists. It has been found necessary for
China to bring about a political revolution as the precondition
for her modernization.

In 1911-12, the revolution succeeded in overthrowing the

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FREEDOM

alien rule and the monarchy together with its historical accom-
paniments. The political revolution was in every sense a social
and cultural emancipation. In a country where there is no rul-
ing class, the overthrow of the monarchy destroys the last possi-
bility of a centralized control in social change and cultural trans-
formation. It makes possible an atmosphere of free contact, free
judgment, and criticism, free appreciation, free advocacy, and
voluntary acceptance.

What has been called the Chinese Renaissance is the natural
product of this atmosphere of freedom. All the important
phases of cultural change in China have been the result of this
free contact and free diffusion of new ideas and practices, which
are impossible in Japan under rigid dynastic and militaristic
taboos. The net outcome is that modern China has undoubtedly
achieved more far-reaching and more profound transformations
in the social, political, intellectual, and religious life than the
so-called “modern Japan” has ever done in similar fields.

I wish to cite one important and fundamental fact as illustra-
tion of the character of the cultural change in China. I refer to
the spirit of free and fearless criticism which the leaders of
China have applied to the study and examination of their own
social, political, historical, and religious institutions. It is no
accident that all the men who have exerted the greatest influ-
ence over the Chinese nation for the last forty years — Liang
Chh-dfiao, Ts’ai Yuan-p ? ei, Wu Ching-heng, Chen Tu-shiu,
and others — have been men who know our historical heritage
critically and who have had the moral courage ruthlessly to
criticize its evil and weak aspects and to advocate wholehearted
changes. Neither Confucius, nor Lao-tse, nor the Buddha, nor
Chu-hsi; neither the monarchy, nor the family, nor religion, is
too sacred to be exempt from their doubt and criticism. A nation
that has encouraged honest doubt and free criticism even in
matters touching the sacred and most time-honored institutions
is achieving a modernity undreamed of by its neighbors whose
intellectual leaders are persecuted and punished for having
taught thirty years ago a certain theory of constitutional law or
for having suggested that certain Sacred Treasures at a certain
shrine might be of doubtful authenticity.

HU SHIH

IZl

To sum up, the modernization in China illustrates the view
that, in the absence of centralized control from above, cultural
changes of basic importance may take place through the process
of free contact and slow diffusion. It is the reverse side of what
has happened in Japan. The breakdown of the monarchy and
its paraphernalia has removed the possibility of artificial protec-
tion and solidification of the old culture, which is then thrown
open to the natural processes of cultural transformation through
free contact and voluntary acceptance.

IV

If I have any moral to present it is this: freedom of contact
and choice is the most essential condition for cultural diffusion
and change. Wherever two civilizations come into contact, there
are natural tendencies (or laws) of one people learning and
borrowing from the other what each lacks or recognizes as of
superior utility or beauty. These natural tendencies of cultural
diffusion will have free play if only the peoples are allowed
free contact with the new ideas and practices.

Where such freedom is denied to a people, where artificial
isolation and solidification are consciously and effectively carried
out with regard either to a whole culture or to certain specially
prized aspects of it, there arises the strange phenomenon of the
“solid core of ancient habit” “devoid of dialectic and dynamic,”
such as has been found in present-day Japan.

There is really no mystery in this unchanging Japan after
seventy years of marvelously rapid change in the militaristic in-
dustrial system. There is no truth in the theory, for example,
that the Japanese civilization has been able to resist change be-
cause it has its peculiar vitality and has attained “the completed
perfection of its forms.” The fashion of men’s dress in the
Western world does not change so rapidly as that of women —
can we say that men’s dress has achieved special vitality and
“the completed perfection of form”? In the same way, sitting
on the floor, for example, was discarded in China so long ago
that historians have difficulty in dating the first use of chairs
and tables. But the Japanese to this day continue to sit on the

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FREEDOM

floor. That does not mean the custom of sitting on the floor has
any special “vitality” or has attained “completed perfection of
form.”

Nor is there much truth in the view that the Japanese are
naturally clumsy in understanding and conservative in their
outlook. Lack of understanding never prevents a people from
accepting new fads. Japan probably never understood the vari-
ous schools of Buddhism when she accepted them. (Certainly
China did not understand some of them when she adopted
them.) Besides, a people can always learn. European observers
in the seventeenth century recorded that the Japanese knew
“nothing of mathematics, more especially of its deeper and
speculative parts.” But we now know the Japanese can become
accomplished mathematicians.

As to their native conservatism, the history of early Japanese
contacts with Korea, China, and Europe only proves the con-
trary. They learned from these foreign peoples everything they
could learn, not excluding things affecting their social, political,
and religious institutions. In recording the success of the Jesuits
in Japan , 1 Sansom said: “Though a number of their converts
were beyond all doubt genuine to the point of fanaticism and
adhered to their new faith in the face of great danger, one can-
not but suspect that it had, by one of those crazes which have
often swept over Japan, become the fashion to ape the customs
of foreigners, including their religion. We know that rosaries
and crucifixes were eagerly bought and worn by many who were
not Christians, even, it is said, by Hideyoshi himself ; and it was
modish to wear foreign clothes and to be able to recite a Latin
prayer.”

I cannot therefore escape the conclusion that it will be the
element of freedom that may yet some day break down the
“solid core of ancient habit” in Japan just as it has already
broken it down in China.

1 In the sixteenth century.

Paul Tillich

Professor of Philosophical Theology , Union Theological Seminary

FREEDOM IN THE PERIOD
OF TRANSFORMATION 1

T HE question of the quality of freedom in a special his-
torical period has meaning only if freedom is subject to
historical change. Such an assumption, however, is dif-
ficult. Of course, every historical period creates different forms,
institutions, and ideas in which freedom is realized. This kind
of change is so obvious that it need not be mentioned. But the
problem is whether the historical change of the forms of free-
dom also entails an essential change in the nature of freedom.
Furthermore, if freedom is considered to be an essential, per-
haps the most essential, characteristic of man, a change in the
very nature of freedom would involve a change in the very na-
ture of man. It would mean that man not only has history but
that human nature as such, the very essential character of hu-
manity, is subject to history and to historical transformation. Is
such an assertion tenable?

In order to answer this question we must first understand the
unique nature of freedom. Freedom has an ambiguity in its
very nature by which it is distinguished from every other real-
ity. Everything except freedom is determined by its own na-
ture. Its actualization follows its nature by necessity. But it is
the nature of freedom to determine itself. Freedom is the possi-
bility of transcending its nature. This utterly dialectical charac-
ter of the nature of freedom makes the doctrine of freedom

1 The term “transformation” is taken from Karl Manheim’s book Man in
the Period of Transformation .

123

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both fascinating and dangerous. A philosophy which ignores the
fundamental ambiguity in the nature of freedom is a philosoph-
ical attack on freedom 5 and in being an attack on freedom It is
an attack on humanity. For freedom makes man man. Even
those who deny it presuppose it. Even those who attack human-
ity by attacking freedom can do so only in the very name of
humanity and freedom. In the act of deciding against freedom
one is a witness for it, since one’s decision pretends to be true,
and this means that it is not dependent on one’s individual or
social nature, but on objective norms which one is able to accept
or reject. This situation has been darkened by the traditional
problem of the “freedom of will,” a problem which cannot be
solved because the form of the question itself is fallacious. Man
and not a section of man is free.

From this it follows that it is impossible to formulate a defi-
nition of human nature in the ordinary sense of “definition.”
For man has the possibility of changing the nature which has
been defined in such a definition. Man is able to break through
the limitations of every definition of man, except that definition
which refers to man’s ability to change his nature. Therefore,
all definitions of human nature and freedom which try to estab-
lish a human nature or a nature of freedom above history are
impossible. Man’s historical existence makes them impossible.
Nonhistorical definitions of the nature of man deprive man of
his freedom, namely, of his power to determine his nature in
history and to become something new through history. Conse-
quently, if we attempt to formulate a definition of man we
should say: Man is that being who is able to determine his be-
ing in freedom through history. And if we attempt to formulate
a definition of freedom we should say: Freedom is that faculty
of man by which he is able to determine his being through his-
tory. And if we attempt to formulate a definition of history we
should say: History is that happening through which man de-
termines his own being, including his freedom.

Freedom is the condition of history, and history is the condi-
tion of freedom j they are mutually interdependent. There is no
history without freedom. There are natural processes, going on
with natural necessity. Denying freedom of history means mak-

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mg history a natural process, depriving it of its uniqueness and
its meaning. Conversely, there is no freedom besides history.
Freedom which has ceased to be the power of determining itself
in history has ceased to be freedom, and men who have lost this
power have lost their full humanity. They are dehumanized.
They have mere ideology, designed to cover the lack of real
freedom in the interest of enslaving groups if “freedom above
history” is praised. Freedom must affear in history, must em-
body itself in history, or it is not freedom,

II

If man is that being who determines his being in freedom
through history, only those can be called men who possess
this freedom and participate in the self-determination of man
through history. Ancient political philosophy agrees with this
view: man is he who is free, and free is he who participates in
the self-determination of the historical group to which he be-
longs. Citizenship, freedom, and humanity are identical.

The slave is a “human being” but not “man” in the full sense
of the word because he is not free. The decision as to whether
someone is a god or a human being or an animal depends on
fate. And whether a human being is man in the full sense of the
word or is excluded from full humanity is a matter of destiny.
Freedom is a quality of human nature and, at the same time, a
fact of historical destiny. These two aspects can contradict each
other. He who is free by nature can become a slave by destiny.
This was a very practical philosophy: the entire social system
and the entire foreign policy of classical Greece were dependent
on this idea. It was the justification of slavery, and it was the
justification of the contempt for the “barbarians,” For, man is
he who is free; free is he who is citizen; citizen is he who is
Greek; consequently the Greek citizen alone is man in the full
sense of the word. Outside of Greece are human beings. The
Greeks alone represent humanity. In this attitude the one great
solution of the problem “freedom and history” is given.

The later ancient development, represented by Stoicism and
Epicureanism, brought about another solution. When the politi-

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cal self-determination of the Greeks was destroyed by Alexan-
der and the Romans and many of the Greek citizens became
slaves of the conquerors, the historical element in the concept
of freedom became weakened. Freedom was considered a nat-
ural characteristic of man generally which cannot be lost by
fate, although fate excludes the majority of men from political
self-determination. The Epicureans even suggested that free-
dom can be maintained only through retirement into a com-
pletely private life. But at the same time the Roman emperors,
influenced by Stoic philosophy, extended freedom and Roman
citizenship more and more, to the point that it became a kind
of universal citizenship. Those who were considered essentially
free as human beings should receive historical freedom as Ro-
man citizens. Stoicism tried to approximate freedom by destiny
and freedom by nature. But this, of course, did not mean the
political self-determination for the overwhelming majority of
people. The government was in the hands of a few. A non-
political citizenship developed, implying equality before the
law and the acknowledgment that all human beings have a nat-
ural claim to become man in the full sense.

Even less political was the Christian idea of freedom. Politi-
cal freedom was considered as irrelevant to the state of being a
Christian, and that means to having the “freedom of the Chil-
dren of God.” This freedom is the only possible fulfillment of
man’s natural freedom. It is the liberation from man’s tran-
scendent servitude, from the servitude under sin, guilt, and
demonic powers. Political freedom cannot provide this libera-
tion and political enslavement cannot prevent it. It is a work of
God and of God alone. But even this transcendent freedom has
historical implications. The work of God is realized in history,
in Christ and in the Church, that is (as the original Greek word
indicates), in the “assembly,” namely, the “assembly of God”
which replaces the city — assemblies of importance and dignity.
Therefore freedom and active “citizenship” in the assembly of
God are identical. The free citizen of the Greek city state is re-
placed by the free member of the universal Church. And the
Church is not only a mystical body, it is also a historical com-
munity. He who belongs to it as a true Christian has not only

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transcendent freedom but also historical freedom. For as a
member of the Church, he participates in determining history,
not directly but indirectly, through the regenerating power of
the Christians in all secular communities. As a member of the
Church he is equal to any other member even if the hierarchical
order excludes him from leading functions within the Church.

In this respect Protestantism carries through the original
Christian impulses. It puts the layman, not only before God,
but also in the actual life of the Church, on an equal basis with
the minister, or more exactly, it makes the minister a layman
and the layman a minister, giving the actual freedom of deter-
mining the history of the Church to every member. So the
hierarchical limitations of historical freedom in Catholicism are
overcome in Protestantism. Freedom before God involves his-
torical freedom, although within the boundaries of the Church.

Further development removed even this limitation. Free-
dom before God, which was originally freedom from guilt by
salvation, became more and more identified with the natural
freedom of every human being, the freedom of self-determina-
tion through history. The “rational” man of Stoicism and the
“saved man” of Christianity were merged into each other. The
democratic doctrine of freedom emerged. Modern democracy
combines the classic ideal of political freedom as the actualiza-
tion of natural freedom with the Stoic doctrine of freedom as
the general character of human beings and with the religious
universalism of the Christian idea of freedom. It implies ele-
ments of all of these and makes something new of their com-
bination. This comes out very clearly in a document such as the
Bill of Rights. In the democratic constitutions the identity of nat-
ural and political freedom is apparently complete. The freedom
of man cannot be separated from his freedom to determine his
historical fate politically. Every human being, that is, everyone
who has reason, is naturally and, consequently, politically free.
He belongs to those who determine the nature of man and the
nature of freedom by determining human history in political
acts. Those who are deprived of their democratic rights are de-
prived of the human characteristic to be free.

From this the life-and-death struggle for the “rights of

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128

man” in many countries, the religious enthusiasm for democ-
racy, for instance, in the United States, the unrestricted affirma-
tion of democracy by the churches in some democratic countries,
are comprehensible. This struggle is felt as the struggle for
essential humanity, for the maintenance of man as man against
the distortions of humanity and human freedom. The World
War as a “crusade for democracy” was a consequence of this
kind of thinking; it was a consequence of the radical identifica-
tion of natural and political freedom and of both of these with
the freedom before God.

It is doubtful whether the present war will create the same
ideology. It may be that the criticism of these identifications
during the period between the two wars has destroyed the pos-
sibility of their revival.

This survey shows that the interdependence of natural and
political freedom always has been acknowledged, directly or in-
directly; it further shows that there is a trend in history to en-
large the realm of political freedom towards its full identifica-
tion with natural freedom or towards universal democracy. The
fact that man is free by nature makes him restless until he has
become free in history.

But this trend is contradicted by another which idealizes the
aristocratic and hierarchical systems of the past and tries dras-
tically to limit those who are free to determine histoiy by polit-
ical actions. Political freedom shall be reserved to a compara-
tively small number of leaders, to the so-called elite, to privi-
leged classes, to educated persons, to landowners, to military
or bureaucratic powers. In these theories, of which the elite
doctrine is the most recent expression, and all kinds of fascism
its most important application, a condition is established beyond
natural freedom on which political freedom shall depend.
Political self-determination is permitted only to those who
have superiority in natural gifts, heredity, tradition, environ-
ment, in brief, in historical fate. Freedom needs something be-
yond freedom in order to become political reality. The demo-
cratic identification of natural and political freedom is denied.
As in some religious doctrines transcendent predestination de-
termines the eternal fulfillment or the eternal destruction of

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man, so in these doctrines historical predestination decides
whether a human being is destined to be a man in the full
sense of humanity or not. The consequence of this doctrine is
that the natural freedom of the majority of men never becomes
actual as political freedom. And this has led in all human
history to a dehumanization of the masses, to a situation in
which the natural freedom of man is destroyed by the lack of
historical freedom. Nevertheless, this theory has arisen again
and again. It has not only been powerful in the past, before
the democratic development began, but it became powerful
again at the very moment when the democratic idea of free-
dom seemed to be victorious all over the world. And it is pa-
thetic to see that not only ruling groups and new “elite” sup-
ported this tendency but that the masses themselves helped to
destroy their own political freedom. The democratic identifica-
tion of natural and political freedom seems to be inadequate
to human nature.

Religion as well as idealism very often has supported this
view by making a strong distinction between external and in-
ternal freedom, and by laying every religious and ethical em-
phasis on the internal freedom which everyone is able to main-
tain, even as a slave. Free is he who acts as a moral personality
or as a saved child of God, even if he is in chains. “Freedom in
chains” is possible in every political system, in democracy as
well as in tyranny. Only the interior freedom is ultimately sig-
nificant. One can live under a bill of rights or in a totalitarian
and collectivistic system, one can be free in both of them, one
can be free in chains and without chains. There is no historical
circumstance in which one could not develop one’s natural free-
dom to full humanity.

And arguments from the historical and political realm are
added to these religious and ethical arguments. It is empha-
sized and it cannot be doubted that human history is shaped in
a much more profound way by nonpolitical men than by any
kind of politician. There are innumerable proofs of this. These
proofs exist not only among those who are considered the great
creative men in human culture but in every man who partici-
pates in shaping human history. Political creativity is a special

FREEDOM

1 3 °

gift, embodied in a few people who under favorable conditions
become political leaders and who determine history in their spe-
cial way. But it is as much nonsense to demand that everyone
participate in political creativity as it would be to demand that
everyone participate in mathematical or musical creativity.
Therefore political responsibility should be reserved for those
who are able to carry it. And it is by no means a deprivation
of freedom and full humanity if the large majority of people
are excluded from political self-determination.

These arguments must be taken very seriously. They estab-
lish a simple identification of natural and political freedom,
such as modern democracy has assumed to be impossible. The
freedom of historical self-determination is not identical with
the freedom of political self-determination . There is a direct
relationship between them but not a simple identity. Political
self-determination is a special and extremely important section
of historical self-determination 5 but historical self-determina-
tion goes far beyond it. Historical freedom is not bound to a
system of voting, of majority, parliamentary representation. It
is not bound to democratic institutions in the technical sense of
the word. But historical freedom is bound to a realm of free
creativity by which history is shaped and transformed. They
are not excluded from full humanity who are excluded from
participation in direct political activity, but only those who are
excluded from any realm of creative freedom and, therefore,
from historical self-determination. If this is taken for granted,
if the distinction between historical and political freedom is
established, the aristocratic and idealistic arguments can be an-
swered in this way: Man’s natural freedom, his complete hu-
manity, does not exist except in different forms of historical
freedom. Any attempt of religion and idealism to restrain free-
dom to the so-called “inner freedom” must be rejected. Inner
freedom cannot even be imagined without historical freedom.
Of course, the “free man in chains” may represent human free-
dom better than a mass of voters. But in order to represent
freedom he must have experienced freedom, he must have lived
under a political system which makes freedom a subject of pos-
sible experience. There is a political suppression which dehu-

PAUL TILLICH

l 3 l

manizes nations and generations in such a way that not even the
free man in chains can be found* The freedom in chains is de-
pendent upon the experience of the freedom without chains.
Even the freedom of the “Children of God” is a meaningless
phrase if freedom never has been a subject of historical ex-
perience. As the religious and idealistic language is derived
from the concrete language of daily life which gives the real-
istic basis for even the highest and most removed symbols, so
the experience, expressed in these symbols, must keep its roots
in the concrete experiences in which they first appeared. Inner
freedom without historical freedom is an abstraction which,
taken for a reality, surrenders historical freedom and, finally,
destroys itself.

Ill

Historical freedom is not political freedom. But the question
is whether historical freedom is possible without political free-
dom and, if not, what kind of political freedom is necessary to
guarantee historical freedom. In order to answer these questions
we must qualify the nature of historical freedom. Freedom
exists only if there is a realm of free creativity, a realm within
which everyone is able to determine history and to transform
human nature through history.

Creative freedom has three conditions: Freedom for mean-
ingful creativity, freedom for autonomous creativity, freedom
for self-fulfilling creativity.

The first condition is the freedom for meaningful creativity,
that is, the freedom to decide about the meaning and purposes
of one’s creative actions. No one has historical freedom who
acts for a purpose, the meaning of which he denies. It is not
necessary that he himself discover and set up that purpose, but
it is necessary that he agree with it. If he does not agree with
it and must work for it in order to maintain his physical exist-
ence, he is enslaved. Large masses of people are enslaved in
this way. They are not enslaved because they are working for
the profit of someone else. One can work for the profit of an-
other without losing one’s freedom, if the meaning and the
purpose are accepted and the other elements of freedom are

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132

guaranteed. And one c.an work for one’s own profit and feel at
every moment the meaninglessness of one’s work. Working for
oneself can be the slavery of toiling for infinite profit and in-
finite economic power without any meaningful purpose beyond
this. It is more than a nice phrase when socialists emphasize
that the salvation from capitalism is not only the salvation of
the exploited masses but also the salvation of the exploiting
rulers who are deprived of this freedom of meaningful creativ-
ity by the tyrannical laws of competition. No romantic glorifica-
tion of the freedom of competition should conceal the dehu-
manizing and enslaving consequences it can entail. The impor-
tant question is not whether man works for himself or for some-
one else or for the group to which he belongs. The problem is
whether his work is supported by the freedom of meaningful
creativity, the first condition of historical freedom.

The second condition is the freedom for autonomous creativ-
ity (autonomous in the traditional and only meaningful sense
of following the laws embodied in things themselves without
any encroachment either by authorities or by one’s accidental
nature), that is, the freedom to follow the objective demands
involved in the nature of one’s work, unrestrained by heterono-
mous demands coming from outside. Every creative work has
its structural necessities which follow from its special nature.
An artist, for instance, has the freedom for autonomous creativ-
ity only if he is free to follow the structural demands, first of
his material, second of the forms of his art, and third of the
special style he represents. In the same way the scholar must
be able to follow the methodological demands of his material
without restriction by religious or political powers. And the
technical worker must be able to follow the principle of the
greatest effect with the smallest means and must not be obliged
to suppress or to disturb creative possibilities under the urge of
political interests. Wherever this freedom is denied, man is de-
prived of his self-determination through history. He is en-
slaved and dehumanized. A judge who is not able to follow his
judgment about the law and the special case to be judged has
no freedom. He becomes a dehumanized tool of political tyr-

PAUL TILLICH I 33

anny. He has lost his historical freedom by losing his autono-
mous creativity.

The third condition of historical freedom is the freedom for
self-fulfilling creativity. Freedom is destroyed if the vital
power and joy which belong to creativity are lost. The freedom
of the self-determination of human nature through history can-
not be separated from self-fulfillment in the sense of the Greek
word eudaimonia . Eudaimoma> or happiness, is that stage of
man in which the potentialities of his nature are fully actual-
ized. Eudaimonia is self-fulfillment. It is distinguished, al-
though not entirely separated, from hedone> pleasure, which is
a secondary consequence but not an essential element of happi-
ness. Ordinarily it should be connected with happiness but it
can be lacking. Happiness is possible even in pain and suffer-
ing. But pleasure alone can never create happiness. The fact
that in the course of occidental thought the Greek principle of
eudaimonia has been confused with the principle of hedone y
that happiness and pleasure have not been strictly distinguished,
that Christian ethics denied not only pleasure but also happiness
in the sense of eudaimonia , has greatly disturbed personal as
well as social ethics in the ancient and modern world. When
socialism demanded happiness for everyone, the foes of social-
ism attacked it as the establishment of the pleasure principle
and used the religious or idealistic arguments against the pleas-
ure principle as arguments against socialism. And since creative
self-fulfillment is essential for human nature, the process of the
dehumanization of the masses in industrial society was sup-
ported by this kind of argumentation. Freedom of self-fulfill-
ment cannot be maintained if the joy and the vital courage of
creativity are destroyed. There is no historical freedom if the
vital condition of creativity is undermined by insecurity, anx-
iety, fear, and suppression of the most vital impulses by the lack
of means to satisfy them. There is no historical freedom if hap-
piness through creative self-determination is extinguished by a
social structure and technical procedures which make man a
part of a machine or a quantity of working power, to be bought
and to be sold. This means that freedom is dependent not only
on political forms but also on a social structure in which the

FREEDOM

1 34

self-fulfilling creativity or the creative happiness of everyone
is guaranteed in order that complete fulfillment of man and
society may be achieved.

Summing up we can say: Human nature demands the free-
dom of historical self-determination. Historical self-determina-
tion demands a realm of creative freedom. Creative freedom
presupposes the freedom of meaningful creativity, the freedom
of autonomous creativity, the freedom of self-fulfilling cre-
ativity.

Political freedom is a status of human society in which the
historical freedom of human self-determination is guaranteed to
everyone by political institutions. Political freedom is the guard-
ian of historical freedom. A political system is free in the meas-
ure in which it is able to guarantee and to promote the free
creativity of everyone in determining human history. The ques-
tion whether in a political system freedom is embodied cannot
be answered by the legal character of its constitution and its
laws. Legal and constitutional freedom does not necessarily im-
ply historical freedom. The form of freedom does not neces-
sarily involve the content of freedom. Democracy is that system
which from the legal and constitutional points of view embodies
more freedom than any other political system. The participation
of everyone in the government in voting and the equal right of
everyone before the law are the strongest expressions of the will
to freedom which can be imagined in a world in which govern-
ment and power cannot be avoided. But even such a system can
become a tool for suppressing free creativity. The very dialec-
tical history of liberalism, the system which bears the name of
liberty, shows clearly that the constitutional form alone is not
able to guarantee historical freedom. It may be necessary to
transform the legal form of liberty into something which ap-
pears to be a strong restriction of freedom in order to save his-
torical freedom. This is the present situation in all countries in
which liberalism has become predominant! And this is the rea-
son why we face a long and catastrophic period of transforma-
tion in which constitutional freedom probably will be doomed
to a tremendous extent and in which historical freedom y free
creativity , and the right of man to determine his own nature

PAUL TILLICH I 35

through history will be y and even is at present, utterly endan-
gered .

Facing this situation we must ask ourselves how far historical
freedom is dependent on constitutional liberties. If it were en-
tirely dependent, no hope would be left for the salvation of his-
torical freedom in the period of transformation. But there is
such hope because historical freedom is not identical with a spe-
cial form of political liberty and consequently with a special
form of constitution and law. There were situations in human
history in which historical freedom was comparatively safe in
authoritarian systems. Monarchy, for example, in some cases
can balance the contrasting class interests better than highly de-
veloped forms of democratic capitalism. This is possible but not
necessary. And monarchy always has the disadvantage that the
lack of constitutional correctives may lead to an arbitrary use
of power by which the largest number of people are excluded
from the realm of historical self-determination. From this point
of view democracy provides more guarantees against the abuse
of governmental power. But on the other hand it makes a situa-
tion possible in which private groups, without public responsi-
bility, control the masses by their economic power to such an
extent that historical freedom is doomed, under cover of democ-
racy. Therefore neither an authoritarian system in itself nor
democracy in itself can offer a guarantee for historical freedom.
No system in itself can do this. Nevertheless, a “synthetic sys-
tem” in which a strong, uniting, and determining governmental
power is checked by democratic correctives must be considered
as the ideal form of political freedom.

But there is not much probability that such a system will be
the outcome of our present situation. It seems to be an ines-
capable law of human history that the historical existence of
the ideal form of political freedom is only a favorable accident,
a chance which sometimes occurs but which has a very transitory
character. Historical freedom y guaranteed by an ideal form of
political freedom , is as rare as all great things in human his-
tory . Therefore our actual task is to find a way in which man’s
historical self-determination is saved in the period of trans-
formation. This period which in economic terms is a period of

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136

mass collectivism, in intellectual terms a period of heteronomy,
in political terms a period of unrestricted authority, affords no
opportunity for an ideal constellation. Freedom in this period
must have the character of “in spite of,” namely, meaningful
creativity in spite of superimposed purposes; autonomous cre-
ativity in spite of collectivistic authority; self-fulfilling creativ-
ity in spite of destructive social conditions. How is this possible,
if it is possible at all?

It is my task to analyze the present economic, sociological,
and intellectual conditions which inescapably lead either to an-
other creative period of history or to chaos and the rebarbariza-
tion of large sections of mankind. There are three interdepend-
ent reasons for this development: first the self-destructive tend-
encies in the economic structure of later capitalism; second the
dehumanizing force of an all-controlling nationalism; third the
disintegrating power of a mechanized and secularized technical
civilization. Each of these causes would be strong enough to
enforce a fundamental transformation of the structure of human
life. Together they are irresistible. It could be said that every
period in history is a period of “transformation.” This is true
if transformation is used in the superficial sense of mere change,
but if it is used in the sense of a fundamental structural disin-
tegration in all realms of human life, it must be applied em-
phatically to our period. It is a transformation through catas-
trophes and revolutions but it is more than catastrophe and rev-
olution. Something really new is forthcoming, something new
which can be utterly creative but which also can mean the end
of any creativity in many parts of the world. It is not necessary
to argue further for this interpretation of the present situation.
The arguments for it are known to everyone and have become
cheap slogans, used and abused in daily life. Things which some
decades or even years ago were treated as esoteric wisdom, ven-
turing prophecy, and audacious radicalism, have become normal
articles, bought and sold at every market. Cassandra’s proph-
ecies, voiced through Spengler’s mouth, have become a matter
of routine for newspaper editorials. But even so, what was true
as esoteric wisdom is still true as exoteric talk. A period of
transformation, in the most radical sense of the term, has be-

PAUL TILLICH

*37

gun; we are in the midst of it, asking whether its outcome for
our generation and for those following will be creation or chaos.

What is the place of freedom in this stage of society?

First, what is the place of the freedom of meaningful cre-
ativity in spite of purposes forced upon individuals and groups
by foreign powers or by the trend of the historical develop-
ment? An outstanding example of the former is the subjection
of the industrial masses to the arbitrary purposes of the eco-
nomic rulers, while the destruction of the middle classes and
their proletarization is an important example of the latter. In
both cases people are deprived of their freedom of meaningful
creativity, of historical self-determination and consequently of
their full humanity. The period of transformation will increase
the loss of meaningful creativity. A few people — economic or
political leaders, civil or military dictators, newspaper, radio, or
movie czars, members of the inner cabinet in so-called democ-
racies — will determine the purposes of hundreds of millions of
people. The concentration of power which is rooted in a mass
society, its technical means and its social and national contrasts
will make meaningful creativity more and more difficult and
even impossible. Very often, of course, the subjection to foreign
purposes is voluntary and requires no coercion. The subjection
can be outspoken or silent, it can express itself in noisy praise
or in silent acceptance of the purposes established by the ruling
group. As long as this is the case the freedom of meaningful
.creativity is not lost. But in a system in which democratic out-
lets are lacking, a situation must unavoidably arise in which the
purposes of the ruling group and of the ruled masses become
opposed to each other. In such a situation, meaningful creativ-
ity is severely endangered. There are only two ways to main-
tain it, the religious and the revolutionary, and both must be
adopted at the same time. The religious way can save the con-
sciousness of man’s essential freedom, of his humanity and dig-
nity, even in an epoch in which the process of dehumanization
has gone very far and historical freedom has almost disap-
peared. The religious question is the question of the ultimate
meaning of life, expressed in religious or in philosophical terms.
Whether the consciousness of man’s natural freedom is saved

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138

in Christian or in Stoic concepts, whether the “freedom of the
Children of God” or the “freedom of the wise man” is the
symbol in the name of which humanity is maintained — if it is
maintained — does not depend upon the religious way alone. If
historical freedom disappeared completely, man’s essential free-
dom would perish in spite of faith and heroism. But there is a
way in which historical freedom can be maintained even in a
period of its suppression: the way of revolutionary resistance.
This does not necessarily mean actual revolution. Generations
of revolutionaries may wait for it in vain. But it does mean the
way towards revolution, it does mean latent resistance before
and manifest resistance when “the day” comes. In the period
of the suppression of historical freedom the revolutionary atti-
tude is the refuge for meaningful creativity and humanity.

The second question is: What is the place of the freedom of
autonomous creativity in spite of collectivistic authority, forced
upon every realm of life by totalitarian claims? There is no
doubt that the period of transformation, at least in its first part,
must lead to collectivistic and authoritarian systems with more
or less totalitarian claims. The example, laid down by the Fas-
cists, and — on the basis of the opposite principle — by the Soviets,
will be followed (although with important moderations) by
the democracies. The tremendous task of a fundamental trans-
formation of the world, politically and socially, will permit no
other way. The consequences for the freedom of historical self-
determination, especially for the freedom of autonomous cre-
ativity, will be very grave. An outstanding example of what
will happen is the suppression of the freedom of the universities
and of many other institutions of science and learning in the
totalitarian countries. Men are deprived of their right, and in
the long run of their ability, to ask for the objective structure
of reality and to act in accordance with their knowledge of
things. A process of deterioration in all realms of cultural cre-
ativity is initiated, which finally endangers the totalitarian sys-
tems themselves.

How can the freedom of autonomous creativity, the second
condition for historical freedom, be saved in such a situation?
Two answers, again, must be given, a suprahistorical one on the

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139

one hand, and an historical one on the other. These are of vital
importance in considering the problem of freedom. Starting with
the second we suggest: In a totalitarian period the freedom of
autonomous creativity can exist only in an esoteric form . In
order to explain this proposition it is necessary to mention the
different types of esoterism and to ask what bearing they may
have on cultural creativity in the period of transformation.
There is a natural esoterism which always has existed and al-
ways will exist because it is rooted in the differentiation of
human abilities. This natural esoterism is entirely compatible
vrith the most liberal management of intellectual freedom. The
esoterism of higher mathematics or of the knowledge of for-
eign languages or of the work of the physicians or industrial
leaders is not exclusive in principle; it is a natural, not an in-
tentional, esoterism. Everyone who is able to understand the
material is a potential member of the esoteric group, which is
not a group in any sociological sense. There are no protective
measures to safeguard this kind of esoterism because it is pro-
tected by its very nature.

Another kind of esoterism is just the opposite of the first;
it is entirely artificial and is not grounded in the material itself.
It can be found in groups which create a mystery around them-
selves in order to be more attractive or in order to maintain
exclusiveness and social prestige. Ruling classes often protect
themselves by esoterism of this kind in order to keep down the
controlled classes. Religious and nonreligious sectarians use esot-
erism as a means to enhance their own self-consciousness and
their esteem by those excluded. Priests, scholars, physicians,
sometimes abuse the natural esoterism, implied in the difficulty
of their material, by augmenting this difficulty artificially in
order to increase the superiority and exclusiveness of their pro-
fession.

The third type is the mystical esoterism. It is rooted in the
fact that some religious and psychological experiences are im-
possible without strict preparations. In this instance, mystical
esoterism is related to natural esoterism. But since the initia-
tion into the mystery group is often dependent on some more
or less arbitrary rules, the mystical is related to the artificial

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esoterism. In many cases it is difficult to draw the line between
the two*

The fourth type of esoterism is the educational . It is rooted
in the idea that not everything can be said to everyone at every
moment, that some things can be said only at the right time
and in the right place, and some things cannot be said at all to
some people* There is a truth which ceases to be truth if it
comes to people who necessarily misunderstand and abuse it*
This is the reason why educational esoterism is used practically
by every educator at all times and can never be omitted. Even
the most autonomous method in education must adapt itself to
the different degrees of maturity in the object of education. The
fact that many educators intensify educational esoterism in
order to enhance their authority over their pupils does not re-
fute the essentiality of educational esoterism.

Very close to educational esoterism, and to a certain degree
identical with it, is the fifth type, the 'political esoterism. We
exclude from this term all kinds of revolutionary movements
which are forced to conceal themselves in order to escape per-
secution by the ruling powers. In such “catacomb groups” esot-
erism of the mentioned types may develop. But the fact of
flight from persecution is not esoterism in itself.

Political esoterism is the attempt to keep in some kind of
seclusion knowledge or ideas which are considered to be dan-
gerous for a political and social system. The problem, faced by
every government, even the most democratic, is: How much
truth and how much error can be admitted, without dangerous
consequences for the group, as a matter of public knowledge
and public discussion? Truth is dangerous for people who are
not able to understand the whole truth, namely, the totality of
implications in a special truth. Therefore the pronouncement
of a special truth can lead to actions that contradict the whole
truth and entail destructive consequences. The danger of error
is obvious. But the difficulty is that there is no truth without
possible and even unavoidable error. Truth lives in the process
of finding truth, and this process involves error, often ex-
tremely dangerous error. If everyone participates in the process
of finding the truth, it can happen that the masses are grasped

PAUL TILLICH

1 4 1

by an error strong enough to destroy a whole system of life.
In former centuries natural esoterism prevented the uneducated
masses from participating in political, social, and intellectual de-
cisions, The problem of esoterism was actual only for narrow
groups. And even within the small stratum of educated people,
only esoteric groups were allowed or allowed themselves to dis-
cuss the fundamental problems of religious and political life.
Public discussion of these problems involved the danger of in-
quisition and condemnation by Church and State, In the later
Middle Ages the doctrine of the “double truth” was an attempt
to enlarge the esoteric groups without surrendering the prin-
ciple of esoterism. First with the rise of Protestantism and en-
lightenment, esoterism as such broke down. Liberalism, sup-
ported by the new means of mass education — newspapers, popu-
lar magazines, radio, movies, etc. — narrowed down more and
more even the realms of natural esoterism. Today esoterism in
every form seems to have disappeared. But actually it has not.
Those who control mass education and mass propaganda are
protected by a new type of esoterism — the esoterism of political
power without public responsibility. It was easy for the totali-
tarian systems to take over this esoterism and to apply it to the
dictatorial form of government.

Dictatorial esoterism is determined by the political interests
of the ruling group. It can and must admit some freedom of
autonomous creativity within the limits of this interest. But it
can never go beyond these limits. Therefore, dictatorial esoter-
ism necessarily creates revolutionary esoterism. Not the fact
that it has to conceal itself makes it esoteric, but the fact that
only small groups are able to participate in the creation of
something which is able to stand the test of the future. Only
people with courage and patience, vision and rationality, at the
same time, can constitute this “esoterism of political vanguards.”
It seems that these groups will be the main bearers of the free-
dom of autonomous creativity in the period of transformation.
It would be necessary that they remain esoteric even if there
were no persecution, because the dictation of truth into slogans
while the generation of a truth is still going on destroys its
creative power completely. But at the same time it is obvious

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that esoterism is not purpose in itself for these groups. Revo-
lutionary esoterism, as directed against hidden or manifest dic-
tators, has the tendency to make itself unnecessary by creating
a fundamental conformity on the basis of which free discussion
and the freedom of autonomous creativity are possible. The aim
of revolutionary esoterism is democratic exoterism.

People who belong to the political vanguard need a faith
that cannot be destroyed, either by force from without or by
skepticism from within. Everyone who belongs to such a group
needs a realm in which he is beyond his own skepticism and his
own weakness. This realm is not necessarily a special religious
doctrine or a special philosophical principle. It is faith and hero-
ism with respect to truth in whatever terms truth may be ex-
pressed. In some epochs it is not a disadvantage that only peo-
ple who are willing to stand sacrifice and persecution are able
to maintain truth and autonomous creativity. The creative spirit,
after a period of practically unlimited freedom, may need the
hardships of suppression and persecution in order to become
more serious, profound, and vital than it was in a period of safe
and unhindered self-expression. Nevertheless, the freedom of
autonomous creativity and self-determination must be the final
aim of revolutionary esoterism.

Finally we ask: What is the place of the freedom of self-
fulfilling creativity in spite of the destructive social conditions
that will prevail in the period of transformation? These condi-
tions are unavoidable because of the heavy losses connected with
radical changes, because of the catastrophes inescapably result-
ing from these changes, and because of the pressure, exercised
by the dictators, those hidden as well as those manifest, on all
groups of people. There is and there will be a tremendous
amount of suffering and destruction of vital power in large
masses. Self-fulfilling creativity will become more and more
the reservation of a few leading groups while all the others
must toil as parts of a mechanism, unable to reach happiness
in their work and continuously threatened by insecurity through
the possible loss of work. How can the freedom of self-fulfill-
ing creativity, how can happiness, be saved in such a situation?
Again two answers must be given. It is the greatness of reli-

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143

gion and the reason for its power over the human mind in all
periods of history that it can provide a happiness of a different
type, called, by religion itself, “blessedness.” Religion as well
as those who attack it has very often distorted the meaning
of blessedness by interpreting it as the promise of a happy life
after death! Rut this is only its mythological expression. Its real
meaning is the presence of blessedness in a situation of deepest
distress and in the extinction of normal happiness. The reli-
gious concept of “eternal life” points to a freedom of self-ful-
filling creativity which is dependent on an ultimate source of
happiness beyond the contrasts of normal happiness and normal
unhappiness. Therefore religion and philosophy as far as they
maintain the idea of “eternal life,” as present in the temporal
and transitory existence, are able to give the first answer to the
“quest for happiness.” It is an answer which in some situations
of human life, and certainly in many situations in the period of
transformation, will appear as a mere paradox. It is a paradox,
but nevertheless it is true and witnessed by philosophers and
prophets.

But the suprahistorical answer alone is not sufficient. It must
be completed by an historical answer. Happiness as a paradox
alone is impossible. It must also become an actuality. How is
this possible in the period of transformation? It is possible only
if the transformation is taken in a revolutionary sense. The
happiness which cannot be drawn from the present reality must
and can be drawn from the anticipation of a future reality.
Freedom of self-fulfilling creativity in the 'period of transfor-
mation can be saved only through anticipating creativity . There
is a happiness of anticipation without which the life of the
masses would be utterly meaningless and desperate. It is prob-
ably the greatest achievement of the socialist movements in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries that they have provided
“happiness by anticipation” for those who struggled with them
for a new order of life. Today the active power of these move-
ments is almost broken. But it does not follow that the creative
impulse is broken! It can be renewed in small groups which are
able to anticipate future fulfillment, to struggle for its realiza-
tion, and to maintain happiness by anticipation. Although the

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weapon of these groups in the period of transformation is not
aggression but resistance, it implies creativity, self-fulfilling cre-
ativity by anticipation.

Many aspects of the problem of freedom are not even men-
tioned in this essay. The problem of national freedom in a
world which becomes narrower every day and urgently needs
some form of supernational unity is not considered. The free-
dom of economic liberalism is only implicitly considered. Its
breakdown in all countries is one of the three fundamental
causes for the period of transformation. No utopian description
of the freedom after the period of transformation is given. The
possibility that this “after” will be the “chaos” has prevented
such an attempt.

Our question was: How can freedom be saved in a period in
which it is becoming more and more a matter of defense and
retreat. A tyrannical collectivism denies man’s essential free-
dom. But freedom, historical freedom, must be saved if hu-
manity is to be saved. Servitude is dehumanization. What we
have tried to show is the way in which freedom can be saved
in the coming period. It is a narrow one, not spectacular, but
profound.

Felix Bernstein

Professor of Biometrics , New York University

THE BALANCE
OF FREEDOM

OF PROGRESS
IN HISTORY

“TT has always been a grave question,” says Abraham Lin-

I coin, “whether any government not too strong for the
JL liberties of its people, will be strong enough to maintain
its existence in grave emergencies.” This remark goes to the
root of one of the most important problems of human history.
There is a balance between cultural freedom and freedom in
the political and economic spheres. There is a balance between
the independence of the individual and the power of the State.
To strike the balance which secures sufficient stability without
checking progress in freedom has been the greatest problem of
statesmanship from the dawn of history to the present day.

There is a great factor to be considered in the obvious slow-
ing up of the progress of mankind. There are conditioned re-
flexes which not only govern the psychology of the individual
but also that of the social group at large. Not only the individ-
ual habits are built upon them, but also the customs and mores
which rule the habits of group life. If progress routs out one
evil habit, it throws into jeopardy at least ten indifferent and
perhaps a certain number of good ones. It is due to our psy-
chological nature that we must act by the use of conditioned
reflexes, partly in the unconscious sphere, and only to a very
small extent through conscious choice under the rule of reason.

Any progress really made by mankind cannot endure unless
it becomes thoroughly anchored in the existing culture so that
its processes can be performed largely through unconscious con-

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ditioned reflexes by the great mass of the people. It is for this
reason that much progress attempted and successful for a short
span of time, but not sufficiently anchored in the minds of the
people, has been subsequently lost. And at any time that prog-
ress has been lost, an older but more stable equilibrium has re-
appeared. The fate of all religious reformers who tried to erect
a totalitarian religious state lies buried beneath this simple truth.
But also the fate of the French Revolution, as a political, not a
spiritual, movement, can be described in these terms.

What did liberty, equality, fraternity mean to the degraded
impoverished populace of Paris after one century of oppres-
sion? Adapted to a slave existence, they lost together with the
oppressive regulations the conditioned reflexes with which the
normal functioning of their morality was bound up. The effect
could only be a release of the unbridled instincts of animal life,
out of which no higher organized social life could be formed.
The historical results are well known. On the contrary, the
frontiersman of the American commonwealth at the same period
in history already enjoyed the benefits of unregimented liberty,
of personal equality, of co-operative fraternity. The American
Revolution only confirmed his way of life and sanctioned and
hallowed his practical convictions. It is no wonder that the
Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights completely
failed to unleash such excesses as France exhibited to a stunned
world.

Nevertheless, the French Revolution did not end in complete
retrogression. In the July Revolution of 1830 the democratic
France was born. But this revolution aimed at much less than
the great revolution of 1789. It meant the ideological confirma-
tion of the way of life of the French bourgeoisie > as it had de-
veloped in the period from 1789 to 1830, and it brought the
ethical principles of cultural and political freedom of that period
to domination.

The great French Revolution meant the end of a period of a
disproportionate civilization. Sorel, influenced by Taine’s esthetic
resentments, tried to prove that the revolution could have been
halted if only the leading classes would have resorted to force.
This thesis, taken up by Pareto, has had the unfortunate con-

FELIX BERNSTEIN 1 47

sequence of giving rise to the fascist creed and its glorification
of force. Let us therefore examine the case fairly.

Under Louis XIV the feudal system of medieval France had
been destroyed by the King, who tried to centralize all power
by making the court the only place of life for the ruling class.
Cultures of this kind make prestige the dominating power of
life, prestige in this case to be won only under the shining rays
of the central royal sun. We know from the observation of the
disproportionate culture of the Northwest Indians today, in
their potlatch game, whose essence is not to have but to squan-
der, to what consequences such a distorted culture leads. The
dominating psychological tendency in time swallows up all
others. La Bruyere in his Caracteres has sketched the most
lively picture of the psychological effects of such a situation.
At that time the unavoidable reaction ensued not in France, but
in the rest of Europe under the leadership of William of
Orange. While in France the young nobility was completely
absorbed in playing the game of prestige — very much like the
Nazi Fuehrer— William of Orange and the Burgomaster of
The Hague formed for the defense of independence and
Protestant cultural freedom the formidable League which broke
the power of Louis XIV in the War of the Spanish Succession.

That war lasted for approximately eleven years, and for
nearly a century longer the broken and defeated system dragged
on its cadaverlike existence. Why did the aristocrats of 1789
not use force against the revolution — as Sorel and Pareto be-
lieve they could have done? Simply because a system based on
prestige cannot last, if it has lost that prestige. The prestige
was based on military and kingly glory. It had been challenged
by a modest king and a kingly burgher of a small Protestant
country which had won its freedom from the domination of
the Spanish autocrat. And again the small country of freedom
had won against overwhelming odds. This was the verdict
against that French culture of prestige, and late but inevitably
that culture died under the blow. This is the answer to the
question why the French aristocrats did not fight. They could
have fought only for a restoration of the kingdom of Louis
XIV, for a renewal of its prestige, for a destruction of the vie-

FREEDOM

I48

torious civil liberty in Holland, and in the whole Protestant
world. Since such restoration of prestige, like that of the Sun
King, was impossible, they could not fight. What they could
hope for at best was what Mirabeau tried: to cross the bridge
to a democratic world before it was too late. It is correct to say
that if Mirabeau had not died, this possibility might have be-
come a reality and the French Revolution might have taken a
constructive turn, bringing to France that freedom which Hol-
land owed to its decisive victory over the French system nearly
a century before.

Let us view another example of our thesis, namely, that
progress in freedom not sufficiently anchored in the culture of
the people must fail. Prussia, the Prussia of Frederick the Great,
could continue the feudal system until the World War be-
cause it had under Frederick’s father blended carefully the cen-
tralizing system of Louis XIV with the cultural liberty of Hol-
land. This blending of traditions made possible the complete
separation of justice from executive power under the great
King. In Prussia one could sue the sovereign without his con-
sent, a right not conceded to the American citizen by the Con-
stitution, and the miller of Sans Souci in doing so saved his
mill from condemnation by the King himself.

Prussia in this blending of power with right could develop
during the nineteenth century, with some oscillations, a system
of cultural progress in which academic freedom was paramount.
Through the defeat of the World War, however, the element
of historic prestige in this blended culture was wiped out. Cer-
tainly the democratic Republic achieved progress in freedom.
However, the republic then erected through defeat, in contrast
to the republics in Switzerland and in the United States founded
on victory, lacked a necessary element of prestige from its very
beginning. It entirely lacked emotional appeal. A monarchical
reaction, if a suitable pretender had existed, might have meant a
milder retrogression, bringing back the stimuli which were lack-
ing in every field because of the disappearance of a power of
prestige such as the former monarchy had represented.

There came instead an attempt, grown out of the World
War and first seen in Italy, to create a system of democratized

FELIX BERNSTEIN

H9

prestige, namely, the Nazi system in which the prestige was
flowing from one central source in an unheard of ramified sys-
tem of smaller and smaller channels. The destruction of demo-
cratic freedom, therefore, was due to the fact that it did not fill
the void left by the fall of monarchy. This lesson must be
drawn: that progress in human freedom cannot be made, that
restraints to political or economic or cultural freedom cannot be
removed, if these restraints satisfy cultural and political needs
which are imperative and contribute to the stability of society.

Only by winning a great prestige, for instance, by establish-
ing a union of Germany with Austria, which Chancellor Bruen-
ing attempted, could the freedom of the German Republic have
been saved and the progress in freedom have been preserved.
And what is true for progress in political freedom is not less
true for economic freedom, and also to a certain extent, for cul-
tural freedom. As soon as too many restraints are removed at
the same time, the cycles of conditioned reflexes break down in
an unexpected manner and the gain in freedom is not preserved.
The sum of progress in freedom at any time in history is lim-
ited by the very psychological nature of man.

It was advantageous for the building of the system of po-
litical freedom in the United States that the economic and cul-
tural field at the time of its growth was relatively problemless.
This, of course, only means that the restraints present were
little felt. Puritanism was still so powerful that men did not
yearn for a life which was abundant in the European way. Not
all taboos were respected by all at all times, but this was a pri-
vate, not a public, problem. Hence the possibility arose of re-
moving further and further the restraints of political freedom.
It was characteristic that the problem of slavery, though well
before the minds of the fathers of the Constitution, was not
touched at the time of its creation.

Let us still consider a final example, where the overemphasis
on cultural freedom destroyed the freedom in the economic and
the political sphere: the example of the Greeks in the classic
age and in Byzantium. The Greeks had by indulging in per-
sonal cultural refinement prematurely weakened their will to
defend their independence. The result of this pitiful develop-

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ment was the educated Greek slave of the rough but brave
Roman master, and in the Orient the unhappy Byzantine serf
of the barbaric system of the Turks. To blame some unique
characteristic of the Greeks for this is entirely misleading. As
long as they were independent, the Greeks were in no way of a
different character from other independent people. But the
rapid emancipation of the mind as visible in character destroys
the stability of character on which independence rests. And with
the loss of independence the ethical character of Greek culture
completely disintegrated.

From these observations the consequence can be drawn that
the Marxian contention that political freedom without economic
freedom is worthless is incorrect. We see, in fact, that the prac-
tical attempt to achieve the Marxian economic freedom has first
destroyed cultural freedom and has not produced political free-
dom. Grave doubts must prevail whether they will be regained
in any foreseeable future. Perhaps a further example, analogous
to those we have mentioned, will be developed illustrating that
any disproportionate progress in one direction will cause a com-
plete loss of liberty and independence in another. The safer way
for progress in freedom is the way of the gradual removal of
barriers and restraints one after another with the full conserva-
tion of all gains already made. In the United States political
freedom does not need further improvement at this time, in
our opinion, but economic freedom and cultural freedom call
for progress. The unequal distribution of opportunity for eco-
nomic rise is probably the very reason for the present stagna-
tion, and it is in this field that greater freedom must be achieved
in the near future.

The Historic Position of the Problem of Freedom

We are at the end of this discussion, and in conclusion we
may call attention to the fact that no matter how successfully
the empirical science of the nineteenth century has increased
positive knowledge, the synthesis leads back to the speculative
thought of the eighteenth. Such romantic ideas as those of
Rousseau that man must only be freed from the shackles of

FELIX BERNSTEIN

151

culture to be perfect find no justification in our present-day
knowledge. We know that man freed from some shackles will
produce new ones for himself. Human nature has no natural
equilibrium which is strong enough to support itself. Reason
and morals are necessary to support social equilibrium and to
prevent society from becoming a disproportionate structure with
eventually Hippocratic traits.

Cultural anthropology has shown that many a culture which
we believed primitive is full of exaggerated social growth and
has become self-blocked against progress. But in one respect,
the standpoint of the eighteenth century was correct, the poten-
tiality for progress in freedom is everywhere present in human
nature. With a slight modification in the formulas of the
thinkers of that period who used the language of Deism, we
can establish the principles of freedom on nearly the same basis.
The fundamental difference consists only in the position of evo-
lution. But it is noteworthy that the German thinker G. E.
Lessing aimed at something quite comparable when he tried to
synthesize the liberal principles of the century by the idea of
a cosmic education of mankind. Say evolution instead of edu-
cation, and the difference in standpoint becomes infinitesimal.

Etienne Gilson

Professor of Philosophy, College de France; Director of
the Institute of Medieval Studies of Toronto

MEDIEVAL UNI VERSALISM
AND ITS PRESENT VALUE
IN THE CONCEPT OF FREEDOM

rrlHE aim and purpose of this communication is to de-
1 scribe a certain aspect of medieval thought and medi-
JL eval culture that can be rightly considered as typical
of that period, and whose lasting value is so high that every-
thing should be done in order to revive it under some form
suitable to our own times. I am thereby alluding to the deeply
rooted medieval conviction that though the various expressions
of truth unavoidably bear the mark of their local origins, truth
itself, both in the speculative and in the practical order, is not
true for a certain civilization, or for a certain nation, but be-
longs to mankind as a whole. In short, truth is universal in its
own right.

Commonplace as it may be, such a statement would certainly
not be allowed to pass unchallenged by some historians, espe-
cially in the field of medieval philosophy. They would rather
favor the contrary view, that before anything else, medieval
civilization was the work of a new race, whose specific qualities
were for the first time expressing themselves in theology, phi-
losophy, literature, and fine arts. These historians do not always
agree on the exact nature of the message brought by that new
race to the medieval world, but they seldom think of question-
ing its existence. For instance, in his famous Geschichte und
System der mittelalterlichen W eltanschauungf Heinrich von
Eicken has suggested that the German genius brought to the

1 Stuttgart, 1887$ ed. of Berlin, 1917, p. 168.

152

ETIENNE GILSON 1 5 3

Middle Ages a hitherto unknown feeling for the value of in-
dividualism. According to a more recent philosopher and his-
torian, Dr. H. E. Lauer, things were slightly more complicated.
What strikes him as typical of medieval culture is the outstand-
ing part that was played by France in its development. All that
was of really vital importance in medieval thought and art, Dr.
Lauer says, first originated in France: scholastic theology, scho-
lastic philosophy, poetry, polyphonic music, and Gothic architec-
ture. If we were now to ask him why French philosophers and
artists were the first to create new forms of thought and new
artistic styles, his answer would be that the French were but a
particular branch of the German stock which, being slightly
more precocious than the rest, were naturally the first to express
the fundamental tendencies of the German race — not individ-
ualism, nor a mystical feeling for the unspeakable depths of
reality, but something quite different, which Dr. Lauer calls a
Eewusstseinseelenanlage . Instead of being characterized, as had
been the Greeks, by exceptionally brilliant dispositions for in-
tellectual creation, the Germans had an exceptionally fine feel-
ing for moral conscience and its many problems. Let us then
suppose that the French were the first among the Germans to
develop that disposition, and it will become clear that nobody
but they could have created the medieval forms of theology,
philosophy, literature, and art . 2

Such generalizations are always impressive. It is very tempt-
ing to reduce an enormous amount of various facts to a single
cause, yet as soon as we try to reconcile facts with their sup-
posed cause, there usually arise a few difficulties. Even granting
that there are such things as races, and that races are charac-
terized by some psychological features scientifically describable,
the problem of finding out what psychological features are
typical of such and such a race would raise huge difficulties. For
instance, without questioning the intellectual ability of the
Greeks, it is rather hard to think that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
the Stoics, and the Epicureans had no special feeling for the
nature and exigencies of moral conscience. As to the medieval

2 H. E. Lauer, Die Volkseelen Euro fas, Grundziige einer Volkerfsychologh
auf Geisteswissenschaf dicker Basis , Vienna, 1936, pp. 54-58.

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Germans, I would not at all deny their exceptional ability to
deal with moral and religious problems, but it is difficult to for-
get that they were greatly helped in realizing the importance of
such problems by their knowledge of the Old and New Testa-
ments, that is to say, of the two books that are a complete ex-
pression of the moral and religious feeling of the Jewish peo-
ple. As to the French, their own case would raise an incredible
number of similar difficulties. We are asked by Dr. Lauer to
consider them as an exceptionally precocious branch of the Ger-
man stock 3 but the founder of medieval philosophy in France,
Peter Abelard, was born a few miles from Nantes, in Brittany,
and we know certainly that he never ascribed his philosophical
genius to some exceptional qualities proper to the German race.
He used to call himself a Brito, that is to say, in Abelard’s own
words, one of those men who are thus called because they are
brutes: “Brito dictus est quasi brutus.” In spite of some honor-
able exceptions, the fact remains that “what the man who coined
the name Brito had in mind, when he copied it from the word
brute, was that the better part of the Britons are fools.” 3

Of course, it could be objected that Abelard, though a bril-
liant exception, was but an exception. Let us therefore grant
Dr. Lauer that there was in the Middle Ages such a thing as
a distinct French nation, that it was a distinct branch of some
common German stock, most generously endowed by nature
with a special feeling for ethical problems and so precocious
that it was able to do pioneering work in that field. After all,
if the French really created scholastic philosophy and scholastic
theology, to say nothing of the rest, there should be some rea-
son for it. The only question now is: Did they actually do it?
And, for that matter, did any particular race, people, or nation
do anything of that kind, between the ninth and fifteenth cen-
turies? Strangely enough, not one of those who have resorted
to the most brilliant explanations for the spiritual supremacy of
the French during the Middle Ages has even dreamt of ques-
tioning the fact under discussion. Everything goes in their the-
ories as if a so brilliantly and perfectly explained fact had lost

3 Cf. Ch. de Remusat, Vie d y Abelard, Paris, 1855, Vol. I, p. 3.

ETIENNE GILSON I 55

all rights not to exist. Yet its existence is an important question
and, as it seems, the first one to be asked.

That during the Middle Ages the center o£ philosophical
and theological studies was situated in Paris is an unquestion-
able fact. A medieval chronicler once wrote that just as Ger-
many had got the Empire, and Rome the Pope, Paris had got
the University. But the very wording of that striking formula
clearly shows that the problem at stake has nothing to do with
the particular interests of a nation or of a race. What we today
call Europe was then considered as a loose, but real, moral en-
tity, endowed with a unity of its own, ruled by a common tem-
poral power, a common spiritual power, and quickened by a
common intellectual and moral life. It is enough to consider
the intellectual activity of the Parisian scholars at the time when
their newly founded University reigned supreme in the fields
of philosophy and theology, to realize the nonnational and non-
racial character of medieval thought.

Who was the first professor of international repute to teach
in Paris? Alexander of Hales, Doctor irrefragabilis, born about
1170-1180 at Hales, in the county of Gloucester 3 he was an
Englishman. Immediately after him came Albertus Magnus,
Doctor universalis ; born in Lauingen, in 1206-1207, Albertus
was a German. The most famous among his contemporaries was
the Franciscan saint, Bonaventura, Doctor serafhicus; born in
Bagnorea, in 1221, Bonaventura was an Italian. During the
same years when that Italian was residing in the Franciscan con-
vent of Paris, another Franciscan was writing there his main
works j born in England around 1210-1216, Roger Bacon, the
Doctor mirabilisy was not a Frenchman. As to the most illus-
trious among those professors, Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic
Doctor, born in 1225 at Roccasecca, near Aquino: he was an
Italian. His most dangerous opponent, Siger of Brabant, whose
name is honorably mentioned by Dante in the Divine Comedy ,
was what we should today call a Belgian. Saint Thomas’s rival
in acuteness of mind and metaphysical genius, Duns Scotus, was
born about 1265, at Littledean, near Dumfries. Although some
of his fellow-countrymen might more willingly forgive me for
calling him a Frenchman than an Englishman, the fact remains

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that the Subtle Doctor was Scottish — and very much so, at least
if what an old commentator says is true, that one of the main
reasons why William of Ockham always contradicted Duns
Scotus was that the one was an Englishman while the other was
a Scotsman, people who seldom agree (qui raro concordant ). In
point of fact, there is not a single European nation, including
Great Britain, Italy, and Germany, to which France is not in-
debted for part at least of her intellectual and moral forma-
tion. This is a debt which, I hope, shall never be forgotten. If,
as I honestly believe, I have not overlooked a single important
Parisian doctor in the thirteenth century, the question how
many Frenchmen were there among them can easily be an-
swered: not a single one. Such is the fact, and were we tempted
to call it an astounding fact, our very surprise would be a suf-
ficient indication that we have lost the medieval feeling for the
universal character of true learning and that the Middle Ages
still have something to teach us on that point.

As a matter of fact, there was nothing to surprise a medieval
scholar in what seemed to him a perfectly normal situation. In
the first place, no medieval professor would have considered
himself as representing the particular truth of a chosen people,
trusted by God and nature with the mission of teaching it to the
rest of the world. On the other hand, if he went to Paris as a
student, and often stayed there as a professor, it was not because
of some exceptional precocity of the French genius. Like every-
body else, he knew full well that Paris was an exceptional and,
in a way, a unique place of learning. Schools were there the
like of which could not be found in any other part of the world,
but neither in the mind of an Englishman, of an Italian, of a
German, nor of a Frenchman were those schools a French affair.
They were in France, as the Empire was in Germany and the
Papacy in Rome, but neither the Empire nor the Papacy nor
the University was a local institution. True enough, the ques-
tion why they were there rather than somewhere else could still
be asked j it often was, and in the case of the University it re-
ceived an answer which I beg to relate, for it is both historically
and philosophically significant.

In the first chapter of the famous Chronicle of St. Gall, its

ETIENNE GILSON I 57

anonymous author tells us how two Irishmen, who had crossed
the Channel on an English boat, once landed oh the French
coast and arrived at a small town on market day. As was to be
expected, those foreigners soon found themselves surrounded
by people who wanted to know what sort of goods they had
come to sell. The answer was that they had brought nothing
with them but wisdom and that their intention was not to sell
it, but to give it free to anybody who might care for it. The
only reward they were asking for such a gift was a shelter and
some food, so that they could teach and live. No sooner had
the mighty Emperor Charlemagne been informed of their ar-
rival than he summoned the two scholars to his court. To one
of them, Clemens of Ireland, he assigned France as a perma-
nent residence. As to the other one, whose name was Albinus,
he was directed to Italy, with the special mission of teaching
there all those who might choose to study under his direction.

I am quite ready to grant that the Chronicle of St. Gall is
not a model of historical accuracy. In point of fact, the man
whom it calls Albinus was not Irish, but English; again, he was
not sent to Italy by Charlemagne, but was simply met by the
great emperor while he was journeying back from Italy to Eng-
land; last but not least, the old Chronicler does not seem to
realize that the Albinus whom he has described as arriving from
England at the end of his first chapter is the same whom he is
about to describe as leaving England at the beginning of his
second chapter. The main point however is not there. What I
am now concerned with is much less the historical reliability
of that ancient Chronicle than the general meaning ascribed by
its author to the epoch-making events which he relates. What
he says on that point at least is perfectly clear: “When Albinus,
.who was English by birth, heard it said that the most pious
King Charles so graciously welcomed all learned men, he
boarded a ship and went to him. Now, that Albinus was a dis-
ciple of the most learned Bede, and his knowledge of Holy
Writ far excelled that of any other man in modern times. For
those reasons did King Charles always keep him at his own
court until the end of his life, save only during such periods
when he was making war. The King felt always proud to be

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called his pupil, and he himself always called Albinus his own
master. He gave him the Abbey of St. Martin, near the city of
Tours, so that he could stay there during the King’s absences,
and teach those who crowded there from all sides in order to
hear him.” Then comes the final and highly significant state-
ment of the old Chronicler: “Albinus’s teaching bore such fruit
that the modern Gauls, or French ( moderni Galli y suo Franci) y
now stand the equals of the ancient Romans and Athenians”
{mtiquis Romanis et Atheniensibus aequarentur) . 4

This was of course a naive exaggeration, but the very en-
thusiasm by which it was dictated is in itself an instructive fact.
Besides, there remains in the old monk’s historical tale a solid
nucleus of truth. There really was an Englishman who called
himself Albinus and whose real name was Alcuin. He had been
born around the year 735, the son of noble parents, in the
neighborhood of York. Trusted by Charlemagne with the spe-
cial mission of organizing schools and spreading learning in a
then practically wild country, Alcuin so well fulfilled the most
ambitious expectations of his master that, at his death, France
had already become in Europe a universal center of learning.
It is hardly exaggerating to say that, without Alcuin’s mission-
ary work, the birth of the thirteenth-century University of
Paris could not be fully explained y but what is especially inter-
esting for us in that story is something else. It is the fact that,
in the eyes of a foreign observer, France had become the main
European center of studies, not at all because the French genius
had created learning, but merely because, through an English-
man, she had received it from the Greeks. That modest inter-
pretation of facts was never questioned by anybody during the
course of the Middle Ages. The French poet Chretien de
Troyes repeated it, in particularly eloquent and moving terms,
at the beginning of his rhymed novel Cliges y as if it were an
obvious and universally recognized truth. We find it quoted
again in the Speculum of Vincent of Beauvais and in the Great
Chronicles of the Kingdom of France. As Chretien de Troyes
had said, what an honor, but at the same time what a respon-

4 Sangallensis Monachi De Gestis Carol i Magni , Book I, Chap, i, 2, in
J. P. Migne, Patrologia (Latin), Vol. XCVIII, col. 1371-1373.

ETIENNE GILSON I 59

sibility ! Having fallen heir to Greek and Latin learning, those
men felt that it was their solemn duty to keep it, to foster it,
and when such would be the will of God, to pass it in due time
to other nations, just as they themselves had once received it.
They certainly felt proud of having been selected by God for
such a mission, but to the best of my knowledge not a single
one ever claimed the privilege of having created out of noth-
ing a new truth and a new culture, either for himself or for his
own country.

Unless we see it in the light of that intimate conviction, such
an extraordinary institution as the thirteenth-century Univer-
sity of Paris ceases to be an intelligible fact. The slightest pre-
tension, on the part of any nation, to be the independent source
of a merely local truth would have made life unbearable to that
crowd of Englishmen, Germans, Italians, Belgians, Spaniards,
Danes, Swedes, and so on, who were teaching and working to-
gether in Paris. Seen from afar, and quite especially from our
own times, a university of that type seems so incredible a phe-
nomenon that many historians have tried to account for it by a
certain lack of national feeling in the members of the Univer-
sity. I cannot help thinking that there is something wrong in
that explanation. Those men were not different from us by rea-
son of something we have, and which they did not have, but
rather by something they had and which unfortunately we have
lost.

When the English humanist, John of Salisbury, went to
France in 1166, his personal reactions to that new environment
were most distinctly English. His letters show that he was quite
disturbed by the fact that, though he was there on a secret mis-
sion, practically everything related to it seemed to be already
known in France. Those French, he writes to Thomas of Can-
terbury, must have very clever spies, be they English or French,
for the most private things that have been said in our own de-
liberations are known by them in the smallest details. The Count
of Soissons, for instance, talks about it as though he had per-
sonally attended all the meetings. Yet, as soon as that English-
man arrived at Paris and saw its schools, the stupendous sight
brought his indignation to an end. “When,” John says, “I first

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descried that ladder of Jacob whose top reached up to heaven,
and it was as a way for the Angels of God ascending and de-
scending on it, I felt compelled to confess at the sight of their
joyful intercourse that truly the Lord was in that place, and I
did not know it. And the famous poetic saying then occurred to
my mind: Felix exilium y cui locus iste datur!” 5

What can be said of such great scholars as John of Salisbury
was no less true of common students. As everybody knows, each
of them belonged to a definite group that was called a “nation,”
and those so-called nations were not overfond of each other.
There was a good deal of national rivalry between them. As
Jacques de Vitry tells us: “They wrangled and disputed not
merely about their various sects or about some discussions, but
the differences between the countries also caused dissensions,
hatreds, and virulent animosities among them, and they im-
pudently uttered all kinds of affronts and insults against one
another.” They affirmed that the English were drunkards, and
had tails 3 the sons of France proud, effeminate, and carefully
adorned like women; they also said that the Germans were
furious and obscene in their feasts, and so on, until at last, reach-
ing the end of his long catalogue of various abuses, Jacques de
Vitry coldly concludes: “After such insults, from words they
often came to blows.” 6 Since, in spite of their national feelings,
those students and masters succeeded in living and working to-
gether, there must have been in their minds some other ideal,
high and strong enough to hold in check national pride. What
was it?

It was, before anything else, a religious ideal. Some his-
torians have attempted to describe medieval Europe as endowed
with a political unity of its own. It is partly true, and partly an
illusion. In a way the Holy Roman Empire always remained
a more or less abstract myth; it was a dream that never came
fully true, except, perhaps, much later, in the books of its his-

5 Heinrich Denifle and Emile Chatelain, Chartularium U niver shafts Pari -
siensis , Paris, 1889, Vol. I, pp. 17-18.

6 As translated by D. C. Munro, The Mediaeval Student , Philadelphia,
1895, p. 195 also quoted by C. H. Haskins, The Rise of Universities, New
York, 1923, pp. 25-26.

ETIENNE GILSON

1 6 1

torians. In the same way, It would be just as correct to say that
even medieval Christendom never quite succeeded in becoming
a concrete and tangible reality. Christendom, that is to say a
universal society of all Christians, tied together, even in the
temporal order, by the bonds of their common faith and com-
mon charity; men thinking, feeling, and behaving as true Chris-
tians should do, loving and helping each other as true children
of the same Father who is in heaven — all those magnificent vir-
tues were perhaps not much more common in medieval societies
than they are now. The main difference between our medieval
ancestors and ourselves does not lie there, it rather rests with
their belief in the absolute value of those virtues. The best
among them were fully convinced that there was an order of
absolute religious truth, of absolute ethical goodness, of abso-
lute political and social justice, to which differences had to sub-
mit and by which they had to be judged. In other words, be-
sides being members of various political and racial groups, those
men felt themselves both members of the same Church and
fellow-citizens in a temporal community whose frontiers were
the same as those of Christian faith itself. Irrespective of their
various countries, two Christians were always able to meet on
the same metaphysical and moral grounds, with the result that
no national considerations could ever be allowed to interfere
with such questions. Religious life being the same for all, there
was no reason why John of Salisbury should not have been ap-
pointed as a bishop of Chartres; and why indeed should French
people have been appointed as professors at the University of
Paris, since better men coming from foreign countries were at
hand? They were not asked by the University to teach what
was French, but what was true. Thus did it come to pass that,
viewing themselves as members of the same spiritual family,
using a common language to impart to others the same funda-
mental truth, those medieval scholars succeeded in living and
working together for about three centuries, and so long as they
did, there was in the world, together with a vivid feeling for
the universal character of truth, some sort at least of occidental
unity.

Is it now possible for us to recover it? I feel inclined to think

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so, at least to some extent and under certain conditions, the
first of those conditions being not to dream of the Middle
Ages as of some lost paradise, or a golden age, to which it
would be our imperative duty to go back as fast as possible.
For better or worse, we are now living in the twentieth cen-
tury, and the only thing for us to do is to make the best of
it. The disruption of medieval Europe into national groups,
attended by the growth of more and more nationalized edu-
cational institutions, has been, as far as we can judge, a prac-
tically unavoidable fact. Let it be added that the multiplication
of national centers of culture, first in Europe and later in Amer-
ica, cannot be considered as in itself an evil. On the contrary,
much good has occurred in the past, and much more will no
doubt follow in the future, from the fact that many human
groups, working in different conditions and developing differ-
ent mental habits, are co-operating in the same effort for the
advancement of learning. Let us therefore quietly accept our
own times, with the firm conviction that just as much good
can.be done today as at any time in the past, provided only
that we have the will and find the way to do it.

A second illusion to be set aside is that the present lack
of religious unity unavoidably condemns the modern world
to live in a state of complete dispersion, both in the moral and
in the intellectual order. It is true that the Middle Ages were
powerfully helped by their faith in the unquestionable validity
of the Christian truth; medieval unity, in so far at least as
it was a reality, was essentially the unity of the common faith.
Yet it was at the same time something else, which, closely
related to it and even rooted in it, was nevertheless distinct
from it. When Alcuin died, on the nineteenth of May, 806,
his long-cherished dream was already beginning to material-
ize; to use his own words, a new Athens had been erected
in Frankland, “nay a more excellent Athens . . . which being
ennobled by the mastership of Christ our Lord, would sur-
pass all the wisdom and learning of the Academy.” With a
remarkable insight, Alcuin had soon perceived that religious
unity could not live, and still less quicken political bodies from
within, unless it found in them, already established by literary

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and scientific culture, some sort o£ natural unity. As he himself
once said, in the new Athens the seven liberal arts would be
there to support the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost.

The whole intellectual history of the Middle Ages was to
justify Alcuin’s own position on the question. In those times
the central problem that spiritual authorities had to solve was,
how to universalize Christian faith? A very hard problem in-
deed, for they were in charge of the Catholic Church, and
catholic means universal ; but faith is not universal in its own
right because, strictly speaking, it cannot be logically nor ex-
perimentally proved. The acute feeling of that difficulty can
be rightly considered as the psychological origin of the extraor-
dinary development of philosophical culture in the Middle
Ages. Since faith could not possibly be proved by reason, the
only hope of universalizing it was to make it at least acceptable
to reason. Hence the remarkable emphasis laid by medieval
theologians on the rational aspect of religious truth, as well
as on the universal character of rational truth itself. To most
of them the necessary foundation for solid theological studies
was logic; to some of them, it was mathematics and experi-
mental science as it was known in their own times; but all of
them were of one mind on the fundamental principle, that
since there was a philosophical, moral, and scientific truth, it
could not but be one and the same for all races and all nations.
In short, coupled with their belief in the universal character
of religious faith, there was in those scholars an equally strong
belief in the universal character of rational truth.

This part at least of their ideal could be fruitfully upheld
and, if need be, revived in our own days. The problem of reli-
gious unity essentially belongs to the theologians, but the prob-
lem of philosophical unity is in itself an essentially philosophi-
cal problem, and unless philosophers tackle it, somebody else
will solve it for them, and probably against them. This indeed
is a point in which each and every one of us should feel vitally
interested; culture and learning themselves are at stake, and
with them the very freedom of the mind which is their only
conceivable source. Whether we like it or not, the sad fact
is that after losing our common faith, our common philosophy,

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and our common art, we are in great danger of losing even our
common science and of exchanging it for State-controlled
dogmas.

Such a development was to be expected. A good many years
ago, at a meeting of the Societe frangaise de Philosophie where
the notion of democracy was under discussion, the French
philosopher Jules Lachelier made the casual remark that the
only conceivable form of democracy was theocracy and, he
added, that very kind of theocracy which William Penn had
once established in the forests of Pennsylvania.

Both Lachelier and Penn were no doubt alluding to the
Book of Judges (21:25), where it is written: “In those days
there was no king in Israel, but everyone did that which seemed
right to himself.” Strangely enough, the Book adds, those free
men grew weary of their freedom, and as Samuel himself was
getting old, they went to him and said to him: “Make us a
king, to judge us, as all nations have.” And the word was dis-
pleasing in the eyes of Samuel ; for he had been a good judge;
he had always enforced the law of the Lord, but he was afraid
lest, by some fault of his, he had induced the people of Israel
to reject that law. The Lord knew his thoughts, and he said
to him, “Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they
say to thee. For they have not rejected thee y but me> that I
should not reign over them.” 7 Yet, before granting the Jew-
ish people what they wanted, God clearly told them what the
right of the King was going to be: “He will take your sons,
and put them in his chariots, and will make them his horse-
men, and his running footmen to run before his chariots. And
he will appoint of them . . . to plough his fields, and to reap
his corn and to make him arms and chariots. Your daughters
he will also take to make him ointments, and to be his cooks.
Moreover, he will take the tenth of your corn, to give his
servants.” 8 We have seen all those things, and worse; but
since men have declined to be ruled by God, and now that
there is nobody to arbitrate between them and the State, who
is going to judge the King?

7 I Sam. 8:7.

8 Ibid., 11-15.

ETIENNE GILSON I 65

It thus appears that despite its paradoxical appearance, La-
chelier’s statement was fundamentally sound, in this at least,
that as soon as men refuse to be ruled directly by God, they
condemn themselves to be ruled directly by man 5 and if they
decline to receive from God the leading principles of their
moral and social conduct, they are bound to accept them from
the King, or from the State, or from their race, or from their
own social class. In all cases, there will be a state-decreed philo-
sophical, moral, historical, and even scientific, truth, just as
tyrannical in its pretensions, and much more effective in its
oppressions of individual conscience, than any State religion
may have ever been in the past.

Against the encroachments of the totalitarian state in its vari-
ous forms, our only conceivable protection, humanly speaking
at least, is in a powerful revival of the medieval feeling for
the universal character of truth. I say feeling, because it is a
natural temptation for every one of us to coin a truth of his
own, made after his own image and likeness, so that its con-
templation may give us at the same time the selfish pleasure
of self-contemplation. We have so often thought and written
that the discovery of truth is a personal affair, that we have
come to think that truth itself is a personal affair. Yet the
most commonplace truth is infinitely better than a whole sys-
tem of the most original errors. Now, perhaps, is for us the
time to remind ourselves and to teach others the old Greek
principle, that unity is better than multiplicity. Not uniform-
ity, which is the mere lack of diversity, but unity, that is to
say, the rational ordering of a manifold reality. Do we believe
that truth is one? Are we convinced that truth consists in find-
ing out an order where there is one as in nature and putting
it where there is none, or not enough of it, as in moral, social,
and political life? Upon our answer to that first question hangs
the future of the mind and of what is left of its liberty.

Should we answer it in the affirmative, it would then become
necessary for us to go a few steps farther. If it is our honest
conviction that truth is one, it will be our absolute duty to
stick to rationalism as the only sound form of philosophy.
Humanly and naturally speaking, there is no unifying power

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above reason. It could even be said that, absolutely speaking,
it really is the only unifying power. What is rationally true is
universally true, for the only thing that lies behind truth is
reality itself, which is the same for all. Not so with feeling,
be it moral, social, or national feeling; not so with intuition,
be it the highest form of esthetic or metaphysical intuition;
and still less than with anything else with the will, its passions,
desires, or interests of any kind. Every time philosophy yields
to the temptation of giving up reason as an organizing power,
it regularly brings about the triumph of those obscure forces
whose self-assertion is the only possible justification. Deep in-
tuition is always my own intuition; good taste is always my
own taste; sacred feelings are my own feelings, and, in the
long run, lawful interests are always my own interests. Where
those forces do not serve individual selfishness, they serve the
still more tyrannical selfishness of social and national groups.
The only thing in the natural order that is unconditionally
and unreservedly neither mine nor yours, but ours, is reason.
But what is the proper use of reason?

Medieval philosophers would answer that it consists in using
it according to its own nature, which is to judge things accord-
ing to what they are. Every sound rationalism is at the same
time a realism. In spite of their many differences, all varieties
of idealism agree precisely in this, that nature is determined
by the laws of the human mind. Medieval realism, on the
contrary, always stood firm on the Greek platform, that the
human mind is right when it conforms to reality. In other
words, medieval rationalism, taken in its purest forms, always
went hand in. hand with some sort of realism. Now it is a fact
that ever since the seventeenth century realism has been con-
sidered by most philosophers as a naive and antiquated philo-
sophical position. Until the realistic reaction that has recently
taken place, particularly in England and in the United States,
scholasticism remained the only upholder of a seemingly lost
cause. We are now beginning to realize what vital interests
were at stake, in the most concrete order of reality, behind
those academical discussions. When it is pursued to its ultimate
conclusions, a rationalism of the idealistic type always con-

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siders itself as justified in prescribing what reality ought to
be. As he rejects all material and external criteria of what is
true or false, the idealist usually ends in establishing what is
his own individual truth as a universally valid dogma. Reason
itself then becomes the very reverse of what it should be;
instead of a unifying force it acts as a principle of intellectual
and social division.

It is a common experience to every one of us that we are
easily satisfied with our own ideas. We are strong on building
theories, or a general interpretation of an enormous number
of facts, on the knowledge of a very small number of facts.
And once our convictions have been formed we stick to them,
in spite of all that other people, equally satisfied with their own
convictions, may say to the contrary. What does this mean,
if not that we are naturally, normally, the prisoners of our
own convictions? What is true of our everyday convictions is
equally true of philosophy and of science. By deciding that the
human mind is free to prescribe its own law to things, idealism
has, under pretense of liberating the human mind from those
things, enslaved the human mind to itself. This is the reason
why we are today confronted with several scientific interpreta-
tions of the world, each of which is equally dogmatic in itself
and contradictory to the others. As to philosophy, it is strictly
true to say that today each philosopher has his own system, and
that far from being disturbed at the idea that his system is not
accepted by anybody else, he rather rejoices in it. If he were
satisfied with accepting as true what everybody else holds to
be true, he would not consider himself as original; nor would
he be considered as such by the others. As a rule, modern
philosophers disagree; it is their dignity, or rather, it is their
very essence, because they are idealists, while the only thing that
can reconcile different human minds is the recognition of an
independent reality upon the existence and nature of which
they can agree. True, in the thirteenth century, as in our days,
there were many doctrinal oppositions, and many philosophical
divergences, but, at the same time, there was a common agree-
ment on a certain number of fundamental doctrines, because
all philosophers admitted the existence of an order of things

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1 68

and tried to express it. As the things were the same for all of
them, what they could say about things was at least compar-
able, and what all of them were saying represented at least
an effort to express the same reality. Today, the effort of an
idealist has no other object than to express his mind, and as all
our professors of philosophy in all the colleges and all the
universities where idealism is prevailing are teaching their stu-
dents to express their own minds, to describe, not the world as
it is, but the world as they see it, the result is that we have
as many philosophies as we have minds 5 rather, the result is
that we have so many philosophies and so few minds.

For indeed, what is a mind that feeds upon itself? It is
empty. As St. Thomas Aquinas used to say, the human mind
is made to say that that which is, is; and that which is not, is
not. Thus centered upon things, the mind feeds upon them, by
assimilating them and conforming its own thoughts to their
nature. When our knowing power is filled up with things, it
is a mind, and then it can express itself, because it is. But it
cannot do it unless it first gathers within itself that knowledge
which it finds only in the external world. This is the reason
why, when a professor of philosophy asks his students to evolve,
each of them, an original conception of the world, he forgets
that the only real originality for a human mind is not to de-
scribe things as it sees them, but as they are, and that unless
a man believes that his mind is regulated by things, he will
never have anything true to say.

Let us therefore frankly state that we are realists; that we
do not care for a system of philosophy so personal that nobody
save ourselves would be ready to accept it. The true freedom
of mind is to yield to the teaching of facts; to reject our own
preconceived ideas every time somebody else is able to show
us that they are wrong; in short, mental liberty consists in
a complete liberation from our personal prejudices and in our
complete submission to reality. This is the true spirit of scho-
lastic realism. And besides, it is Christian. The Gospel does
not ask to say: “It seems to me, hence it is”; or, “I do not
think so, hence it is not so”; but, a Est, est; non, non: that
which is, is; that which is not, is not.” Either we shall be free

ETIENNE GILSON

169

from things, and slaves to our minds, or free from our minds
because submitted to things. Realism always was and still re-
mains the source of our personal liberty. Let us add that, for
the same reason, it remains the only guarantee of our social
liberty.

For it is a last and all-important feature of medieval philos-
ophy that its rationalism was not only a realism, but a per-
sonalism as well. Just like trees and any kind of living things,
men are individualized and distinct from each other by then-
bodies. Such is the metaphysical reason why, grounded as it
is on matter, individualism is always a source of divisions and
oppositions. When men consider themselves as mere individ-
uals, the so-called liberalism is bound to prevail, until political
disorders and social injustice make it unavoidable for the State
to become totalitarian. Individualism always breeds tyranny,
but personalism always breeds liberty, for a group of indi-
viduals is but a herd, whereas a group of persons is a people.
Just as they are individuals by their bodies, men are persons
by their intellects. Now it is a remarkable character of intel-
lectual knowledge, at least as medieval philosophers under-
stood it, that it is in us both strictly personal and wholly uni-
versal. As a rational being, every one of us is a person, that is
to say an original source of true knowledge and of free deter-
minations. Yet, precisely because and in so far as our knowledge
is rational, it is universal in its own right. Human reasons and
human wills are bound to agree, to the full extent that every
one of them keeps faith with its own nature, which is to be
rational. Our only hope is therefore in a widely spread revival
of the Greek and medieval principle, that truth, morality, so-
cial justice, and beauty are necessary and universal in their own
right. Should philosophers, scientists, artists, make up their
minds to teach that principle and if necessary to preach it in
time and out of time, it would become known again that there
is a spiritual order of realities whose absolute right it is to
judge even the State, and eventually to free us from its oppres-
sion.

Rationalism, realism, personalism, such were the philosoph-
ical foundations of medieval universalism, such also are today

FREEDOM

I/O

the philosophical conditions for its revival. No nations, no races,
no learned bodies have anything to lose by favoring such an atti-
tude; never was the French influence more warmly welcomed
or more universally felt than in the thirteenth century, when
it exerted itself through that strange University of Paris, where
not a single one of the most famous professors was French.
This is one of the most useful lessons we can still learn from
the Middle Ages, and one that should remain before our minds
as a safeguard against the worst kind of slavery to which man-
kind is now being submitted by totalitarian states — mental
slavery. In the conviction that there is nothing in the world
above universal truth lies the very root of intellectual and
social liberty.

2. FREEDOM FOR THE MIND

Robert A. Millikan

Director of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of the
California Institute of Technology

SCIENCE, FREEDOM, AND THE
WORLD OF TOMORROW

E VEN though “prophecy is the most gratuitous form of
mistake,” and even though there is obviously the pos-
sibility that something so completely foreign to my
thinking may happen as to make any prognosis that I may
hazard now appear ridiculous in the years to come, yet I am
going to be. foolish and rash enough to forecast that, barring
the return of the dark ages through the triumph the world
over of tyranny over freedom, of the spirit of world conquest
over the spirit of reason and peaceful change, life in America
fifty or a hundred years hence will not differ nearly as much
from the life of today as the life of today differs from that
of a century or even a half century ago. The processes and
techniques that have been responsible for the enormous changes
of the last century will continue to improve our economic and
social well-being, and to assure potentially a state of freedom
for man, but the main changes will come from a more gen-
eral understanding by the voting public of the nature of these
processes and a more intelligent use of them. This will mean
the gradual elimination of the effort to violate natural and
social laws or, arithmetically stated, to make two plus two
equal six, as we have been so ignorantly and so disastrously
trying to do in much of our social floundering of recent years.

So long as one is considering only the physical or biological
basis of change the informed and competent scientist has some
reason for confidence in his analysis as to the general direction

173

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174

which progress can and must take. He at least knows a great
many sorts o£ things that will not happen, and these are in
the main the very things that the uninformed dreamers and
wishful thinkers — the emotional pseudo reformers, not the real
ones — hope and expect to see happen. Thus, we shall never be
able to transform the energy released in the burning of coal
or in the absorption of the sun’s rays directly and completely
into electrical energy. Indeed, we shall never be able to go
very much farther in this direction than we have already gone.

Today the most efficient internal combustion engines trans-
form into work 35 per cent of the heat energy released in the
burning of the fuel, and it is safe to predict that in continuous
operation we shall never be able to make very great advances
beyond this limit. By that I do not mean that through im-
provements in details efficiencies in the neighborhood of say
50 per cent are completely out of the question. But in any
case, the so-called second law of thermodynamics, which has
now taken its place as a part of the core of established knowl-
edge in physics, stands in the way of the realization of the
dreams of the multitude of inventors and magicians who still
want to transform the sun’s heat rays directly and completely
into work. Though the knowledge that it cannot be done is less
than a hundred years old, it is about as firmly established as
is the law of gravitation.

I have chosen the foregoing illustration because it lies at
the very base of any correct analysis of what science has done
and of what it is capable of doing in the future in bettering
man’s lot on earth. Let us look first at what it has done, for
this will enable us to understand better what it can do. When
in 1825 my grandfather loaded into a covered wagon his young
wife, his Lares and Penates, and all his worldly goods, and
trekked west from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, first to the
Western Reserve in Ohio, and again in 1838 to the banks of
the Rock River in western Illinois, the conditions of that mi-
gration, the motives prompting it, the mode of travel of the
emigrants, their various ways of meeting their needs and solv-
ing their problems, their whole outlook upon life, were ex-
traordinarily like those which existed four thousand years

ROBERT A, MILLIKAN

175

earlier when Abraham trekked westward from Ur of the Chal-
dees. In a word, the changes that have occurred within the
past hundred years not only in the external conditions under
which the average man, at least in this Western world, passes
his life on earth, but in his superstitions, such as the taboo on
the number thirteen or on Friday sailings (why, my own grand-
mother carried a dried potato in her pocket to keep off rheu-
matism), in his fundamental beliefs, in his philosophy, in his
conception of religion, in his whole world-outlook, are prob-
ably greater than those that occurred during the preceding four
thousand years all put together. Life seems to remain static
for thousands of years and then to shoot forward with amaz-
ing speed. The last century has been one of those periods of
extraordinary change, the most amazing in human history.

If, then, you ask me to put into one sentence the cause of
that recent, rapid, and enormous change and the prognosis
for the achievement of human liberty, I should reply, It is
found in the discovery and utilization of the means by which
heat energy can be made to do man y s work for him . The key
to the whole development is found in the use of power ma-
chines, and it is a most significant statistical fact that the stand-
ard of living in the various countries of the world follows
closely the order in which so-called laborsaving devices have
been most widely put into use. In other words, the average
man has today more of goods and services to consume in about
the proportion in which he has been able to produce more of
goods and services through the aid of the power machines
which have been put into his hands. In this country there is
now expended about 13.5 horsepower hours per day per capita
— the equivalent of 100 human slaves for each of us 5 in Eng-
land the figure is 6. 7, in Germany 6.0, in France 4.5, in Japan
1.8, in Russia 0.9, in China O.5. 1 In the last analysis, this use
of power is why our most important social changes have come
about. This is why we no longer drive our ships with human
slaves chained to the oars as did the Romans and the Greeks.
This is why we no longer enslave whole peoples, as did the

1 These figures are substantially as given in Read, An Economic Review,
1933, p. 5 8 j and in Hirshfeld, Toward Civilization, 1929.

FREEDOM

176

Pharaohs, for building our public structures and lash them to
their tasks. This is why ten times as many boys and girls are
in the high school today in the United States as were there in
1890 — more than five million now, half a million then. This
is why we have now an eight-hour day instead of, as then, a
ten, a twelve, or sometimes a fourteen-hour day. This is why
we have on the average an automobile for every family in the
country. This is why the lowest class of male labor, i.e., un-
skilled labor, gets nearly twice as much in real wages in the
United States as in England, three times as much as in Ger-
many or France, and thirteen times as much as in Russia, and
this is why the most abused class of labor in the world, domes-
tic service, is even better off relatively in this country though
completely unorganized, i.e,, through the unhampered opera-
tion of economic laws, than is any other class of labor, skilled
or unskilled, in other countries.

Do not think that these are the one-sided pronouncements
merely of an enthusiastic scientist. Anyone can check them who
will begin to study them. Listen to President Karl Compton’s
formulation of the results of his similar historical studies. 2 He
says, “From the days of the cave man, all through history
up to the modern era of science, there were only two primi-
tive recipes for securing the materials desired for the more
abundant life. One was to work hard and long in order to pro-
duce more, and the other was to take the good things of life
from some one else, by theft, conquest, taxation or exploita-
tion.

“To get the good things of life by taking them from others
is a primitive instinct, undoubtedly developed by the age-old
struggle for existence. We have all seen monkeys, or seagulls,
or wolves, or pigs snatching food from each other, fighting to
possess it, or shouldering each other away from the trough.
When human beings carry this philosophy too far beyond the
accepted standards, as did Jesse James and John Dillinger, we
call them ‘public enemies.’ But this same philosophy of taking
what we want from others, by violence and trickery, or by

2 The Social Implications of Scientific Discovery , delivered at the American
Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, March 15, 1938 [Lancaster, 1938].

ROBERT A. MILLIKAN 1 77

legalized strategy and force, has run all through human his-
tory.

“But, in recent times, modern science has developed to give
mankind, for the first time in the history of the human race,
a way of securing a more abundant life which does not simply
consist in taking away from someone else. Science really creates
wealth and opportunity where they did not exist before.
Whereas the old order was based on competition, the new
order of science makes possible, for the first time, a co-opera-
tive creative effort in which every one is the gainer and no one
the loser.

“For this reason, I believe that the advent of modern science
is the most important social event in all history. It marks the
point at which men have come to understand themselves and
the world they live in well enough to begin systematically
to control the hidden forces of nature to their advantage. Al-
ready science has done wonders to raise the standard of living
and of knowledge, but these hidden forces are so great that
we are assuredly only at the beginning of things possible.

“Some significant facts regarding the effect of the machine
on the wages and employment of the worker are these: Count-
ing 1840 as about the year in which power machinery came to
be important in the United States, we find a steady increase
since that date in the ratio of average wages to average prices
of commodities, so that it is now about seven times what it
was in 1 840. In other words, the average wage earner in Amer-
ica can today buy seven times as much with his wages as he
could in 1 840 5 or more than twice as much as he could in
1910. Also despite increasing population and increasing use
of labor-saving machinery, the percentage of our population
gainfully employed increased 25 per cent between 1870 and
1930.

“More material progress has been made during the past
one hundred and fifty years under the American system of
business enterprise than during all the preceding centuries in
world history. This record of achievement is a challenge to
those who would radically change that system. ... Under
this system, the United States with a population of less than

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178

7 per cent of the world’s total controls about 40 per cent of
the wealth of the world. One hundred years ago the average
person had about 52 wants of which 16 were regarded as
necessities. Today the wants number 484 on the average, of
which 94 are looked upon as necessities.” 3

These facts, with their primary cause, are basic in enabling
us to forecast the possibilities of improvement and of acquiring
a state of true democratic liberalism in the century that is
ahead. They make it well-nigh certain that we shall increase
in economic well-being and in potential liberty in the future
just as we have in the past in just the proportion in which we
continue to apply science and engineering to our industries and
thus produce more and more in goods and services per man
hour, thus freeing more and more men, more and more time,
and more and more brains for education, for research, for
art, and thus for human freedom. There is a saturation point
for automobiles and radios, but there is no such thing as satura-
tion in education, in the service industries generally, or in
liberty.

Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of
human wants. It is a simple historical fact that these wants
have actually developed with great rapidity wherever and
whenever laborsaving machines have been rapidly introduced.
In 1900 60 per cent of our population was on, or supported
immediately by, the farm; in 1930 not over 25 per cent. With-
out serious unemployment in that period the millions of dis-
placed farmers found their way into garages, service stations,
newly created secretarial jobs, news reporting, a newly created
telephone service, advertising, insurance, gardening, domestic
service, and a thousand other service industries, and no serious
or prolonged unemployment occurred until the enterprisers
who normally create the new positions began to be suppressed,
legislated against, and * intimidated by unwise financial and
political policies. The faster science and engineering are applied
to industry the faster we ought to progress. There is literally
no other way of comparable effectiveness to raise the standard

3 This last paragraph of the quotation from Compton he in turn takes
from a pamphlet distributed by the First National Bank of Boston.

ROBERT A. MILLIKAN 1 79

o£ living, and the chief element in its effectiveness is in get-
ting more power into the hands of the laborer so that he
can produce more for himself, for in the last analysis the
laborer taken as a whole gets under almost any modern social
system practically all that he produces. According to the United
States Department of Commerce, in 1936 labor received di-
rectly 66. 5 per cent of the national income. Indirectly, it re-
ceived nearly all the rest of it, since the idle rich represent
an insignificant fraction of the population and they pass on
practically all that they receive to workers of some kind.

My forecast of the future, then, must depend on what the
future’s sources of power are to be and on the cost of that
power. That is why I began with a consideration of the possi-
bility of getting more work out of a pound of coal. At present
the main sources of power are coal and oil, with water playing
a minor role and being in general more expensive. This situa-
tion will continue for a thousand years, for though the oil will
perhaps be gone in fifty years, the coal will last for at least
another millennium. The big steam plant is now nearly or
quite as efficient as the best Diesel motor, but for small power
purposes, motor vehicles and the like, the internal combus-
tion engine is and will continue to be indispensable. However,
we already know how to make liquid fuel from coal, so that
when the oil is gone we shall still be able to get liquid fuel for
our internal combustion engines. There are, I think, no other
possible sources of power of comparable cheapness. When the
oil and the coal are gone we shall get our power either di-
rectly from the sun through solar motors or windmills or
tidal machines, or else indirectly through growing and burn-
ing plants j but it will then cost us more than it does now. So
far as tapping the energy “locked up in the atoms” is con-
cerned, we can dismiss that possibility. We can of course do
it now in principle through radioactivity, but I see no possi-
bility fifty years from now of supplying the world’s power
needs, or even a minute portion of them, from any such source.

For the foregoing reasons, then, fifty years from now the
world will look to us, from the point of view of power, not so
very different from what it looks now. Air travel will of

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180

course have increased, but the great bulk of the freight will
go as now by surface vehicles or by steamships propelled in
the essential particulars much as they are today. The art of
communications, too, is already a pretty well perfected art, and
though it may be considerably cheaper than now, more mes-
sages being simultaneously carried over a given cable, so far
as the techniques used are concerned I do not expect any very
radical or startling change.

Among the natural sciences biology has the opportunity to
do the big new things so far as their immediate effect on human
living is concerned, and I have no doubt that in the field of
public health, the control of disease, the cessation of the con-
tinuous reproduction of the unfit, etc., big advances will be
made, but here I am not a competent witness, and I find on the
whole those who are the most competent and informed the
most conservative.

The most burning and most uncertain situation about the
future has to do with social and political matters, and it should
be remembered that all the preceding forecast was based on
the assumption that our present civilization would not be de-
stroyed by man’s present or prospective international wicked-
ness, stupidity, and folly. I know of no direct way in which
science can prevent that, for I see no prospect of our ever being
able to turn some new type of ray upon a dictator filled with the
lust for power and conquest and thus transform him into a
humanitarian. Indirectly, however, the sciences of explosives
and poison gases, of aerodynamics, of communication with its
corollary, the rapid spread of knowledge among the people,
are doing the work. The fact that the ultimate resources are in
the democratic countries, as the science of geology has shown,
something like three-fourths of the coal and the metals, the
ultimate sources of power, being in these countries and that
these countries can be and have already been roused to arm to
defend themselves, that is the great influence that gives promise
that a permanent method of assuring peace may ultimately be
worked out. But these countries must have the intelligence, the
long-range selfishness to see the hopelessness, the folly at a time
like this, of a policy of division and isolation. They must obvi-

ROBERT A* MILLIKAN I 8 I

ously, it seems to me, join their powers in time to show the
international bandits the hopelessness of their spring at the
throat of the world. If they, including ourselves, will do this
then I stand by my prognosis of a golden age of human liberty
and human dignity ahead through the further growth of science
and its application to the well-being of mankind.

Edwin Grant Conklin

Professor Emeritus of Biology Princeton University

INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM

I N the old Castle at Nuremberg in Germany is a museum
containing a “torture chamber” where are preserved the
instruments by which heretics and freethinkers were for-
merly tortured with hot irons, thumb screws, racks and wheels
on which bodies were disjointed, and the famous Eiserne Jung-
frau within whose embrace the bodies of victims were slowly
pierced by iron spikes. These old-time martyrs for intellectual
freedom were generally theological heretics, though some of
them were searchers for scientific truth. Of late the vast num-
ber of martyrs have been victims of political or racial intoler-
ance, but the spirit of intolerance is essentially the same
whether theological, political, or racial. Such intolerance is
directly opposed to intellectual freedom and to the true spirit
of religion, science, social harmony, human brotherhood, and
the dignity of man.

I have been asked to write about “Intellectual Freedom.”
It is enough to say that without such freedom there can be no
continuing progress in science. The very foundation of science
is intellectual freedom: freedom to seek the truth wherever it
may be found 3 freedom to experiment, to “try all things and
hold fast to that which is good” 3 freedom to criticize, modify,
and verify 3 freedom to hold and teach any conclusion for which
there is verifiable evidence. The man of science recognizes that
knowledge is incomplete and subject to revision, that there is
no legitimate compulsion in science except the compulsion of

182

EDWIN GRANT CONKLIN I 83

evidence, and that truth can never be established by authority
or compulsion but only by the appeal to facts and by rational
persuasion.

The aim of science is to know the truth rather than to sup-
port creeds or dogmas, whether these be theological, political,
or scientific, in the conviction that even unwelcome truth is
better than cherished error, that the continued welfare of man-
kind depends upon the increase and diffusion of knowledge
and ethics among men, and that such truth alone can make us
free.

For many centuries the search for truth has been hampered
or stopped by those who assumed that they knew the whole
truth and that it could be established by force. They compelled
acceptance of their ideologies by death, torture, or “protective
isolation” and so far as possible they put an end to free inquiry
and genuine science. But always the free spirit of some men
has refused to be bound by such limitations. In some of the
world’s greatest heroes the flame of intellectual freedom
could not be quenched, and they have kept alive for us the
most noble and precious heritage of man.

Science should be the supreme guardian of intellectual free-
dom, but in this world-crisis few individual scientists have
fought the foes of freedom, and organized science in the
countries most affected has done little or nothing to oppose
tyranny. When academies of science are regimented for cer-
tain political creeds, when biology as well as sociology must
adopt the creed of Marx, science has committed suicide. Dic-
tated science is pseudo science. Dictators seek to control men’s
thoughts as well as their bodies, and at present intellectual
freedom is stifled in certain great countries of Europe with a a
cruelty more intense than anything Western civilization has
known in four hundred years.” We may not be able to help
our brother scientists in other lands by direct action but we
can by such a co-operative effort as the synthesis of ideas in
this volume depicts — the effort to clarify the confusion that
exists in values — convince them that the spirit of science still
survives here, and thus bring to them our sympathy and the
assurance that freedom has not perished from the earth.

FREEDOM

What can we do to stem the tide of intolerance which is
rolling over the earth? How can we most effectively main-
tain our freedom? These are the most important problems
that confront us today. First of all it is most important for
us to remember that freedom is not a gift of nature or of
God. It has been bought with a great price. Through long
centuries of struggle and martyrdom men have been winning
freedom from the rigors of nature and the tyrannies of men,
from slavery of the body and of the mind, and it is most im-
portant for us to remember that this freedom which has been
hardly won may be easily lost. Unless we are willing to pay
the price which our ancestors paid we also may lose our free-
dom, as so many others have done in these times.

But it would be a sad conclusion if such endeavors as the
one of this volume were to end only in eloquent, rhetorical
phrases and emotion. Other things than emotion are needed
if we are to meet the dangers which threaten. It behooves
us to consider the causes that have led to suppression of free-
dom elsewhere and as far as possible to avoid those conditions
here. Science seeks the causes of phenomena and would con-
trol them by controlling causes.

Chief among those conditions, strange to say, was individual
freedom carried to such extremes that it led to social anarchy.
A free society is based upon compromise and adjustment. Life
itself is such a compromise or balance between opposing forces,
and a free society is based upon compromise among antago-
nistic opinions. All social freedom is lost when intolerance of
opposing opinions of individuals, labor unions, political par-
ties, social classes, leads to anarchy. In the establishment of
this government the clashing views of many of the founders
nearly led to the failure of the entire enterprise. But the spirit
of compromise, so notably represented by Benjamin Franklin,
finally led to adjustment of differences and the adoption of
our Constitution. The particular danger that threatens re-
formers of all types is the inability or refusal to make adjust-
ments among opposing opinions, stubbornly to insist that their
views are the only true ones. If only idealists, reformers,
parties, and nations had more of the spirit of genuine science

EDWIN GRANT CONKLIN I 85

they would know that human knowledge is relative and not
absolute 3 they would conceive it possible that they might be
mistaken, and most of all they would be willing to make tem-
porary compromises and adjustments in the interests of social
harmony in the conviction that time which tries all things
would sooner or later establish the truth.

Intolerance breeds intolerance not only in Russia, Italy, and
Germany, but also in America. That way lies the loss of all
freedom. Let us avoid in America the causes which have led
to the loss of freedom in these countries of Europe.

II

We turn now to the scientific basis of freedom and
democracy. In the discord, suffering, and terrors of these trou-
blous times it is comforting to get the long and wide view of
human evolution and history. In a famous passage in Sir
George Trevelyan’s Garibaldi he pictures a visitor on the
Janiculum Hill overlooking Rome and the valley of the Tiber
and reviewing the drama of human history that had been en-
acted on that world-compelling stage. In such a grand drama,
minor characters and events, however important they may have
seemed at the time, are subordinated to the main course of
human history throughout the ages.

In similar manner science affords a large, timeless, Olym-
pian view of the course of human evolution. Viewed from
this standpoint, what do we learn regarding the principles of
democracy? Are these principles minor and fleeting events
in the drama of evolution, or do they represent major achieve-
ments and trends, both individual and social?

The birth and growth of freedom from fixed mechanical
responses may be witnessed by comparing the behavior of the
lowest animals with that of the higher ones, or by contrasting
the responses of germ cells with those of developed organisms.
We do not need to go back five hundred million years in evo-
lution to study these earlier forms of life 3 we can study the
earlier stages of development in the individuals of today, the
reactions and responses of germ cells and early embryos, and

FREEDOM

1 86

contrast them with the behavior of adult forms. We find in
the earlier forms, whether in evolution or in development,
that responses are fixed and mechanistic to a very large extent,
but as development progresses, both in evolution and in indi-
vidual development, we find increasing freedom from fixed
mechanical responses.

In protozoa and germ cells responses are relatively fixed,
although even here behavior may be modified under repeated
irritation and failure of the stereotyped response to bring re-
lief. In higher animals and in later stages of development
there is still greater ability to modify behavior in order to
avoid injury or find satisfaction. Finally in the highest ani-
mals and especially in man we find increasing ability to regu-
late behavior in the light of past experience and thus to attain
a certain degree of freedom from rigidly fixed behavior. Here,
in this manner, we have the dawning grace of a new dispensa-
tion, the open door into a life of freedom, choice, purpose.

Animals seeking satisfaction — and they all do — learn by
trial and error to avoid unfavorable environments, to find
favorable ones, to escape from or dominate other animals, to
protect their young, and often to render mutual aid to one
another: in short, they adapt themselves to their environments
and conditions of life. Man alone is able to control his environ-
ment and adapt it, at least to a certain extent, to his needs,
rather than adapt himself to environment. Through long cen-
turies of discovery and invention man has been achieving free-
dom from the rigors of nature, so that he is now able, in large
part, to control his sources of food and clothing, to provide for
himself not only shelter from the weather, but artificial cli-
mates by means of heating, illumination, and air condition-
ing. He is no longer wholly dependent for food and clothing
upon the bounty of nature, but by means of agriculture, trans-
portation, and refrigeration he can levy tribute upon the whole
earth for his needs. He no longer relies solely upon his own
muscular effort, nor upon the labor of human slaves, in carry-
ing out his plans and purposes, but he harnesses the illimitable
forces of nature, water power, steam, and electricity, to do his
work. He is no longer limited in habitat to a single locality,

EDWIN GRANT CONKLIN I 87

but by means of rapid transportation and communication he
has become a citizen of the entire earth.

But even more important than this conquest of material
nature and the freedom it brings is the winning of the free-
dom of body, mind, and spirit from the tyrannies of other
men. Through long centuries of struggle and martyrdom man
has been winning freedom from slavery of body. In all former
civilizations slavery was accepted as a necessary and even a
divine institution. In ancient Egypt and Assyria hundreds of
thousands of miserable slaves toiled under the lashes of their
masters to build great cities, monuments, and tombs, and to
wage wars for the glory of rulers and kings. Even in Greece,
in its golden age, only one-fifth of the population were free
persons, and the grandeur that was Rome was founded on
the labor and suffering of multitudes of slaves. Through all
the centuries down to recent times slavery has persisted, but
within the memory of many persons now living slavery as a
legal institution has been abolished everywhere.

More slowly, and yet more significantly, the passing cen-
turies have witnessed the gradual emancipation of the minds
and spirits of men from the domination of overlords. The
spread of education through free schools, free assemblies, free
press, and now the radio, is bringing information and enlight-
enment to more and more people, and is correspondingly
weakening the bonds of superstition and authority. No longer
do free men think only what they are told to think, believe
all they are told to believe, and submit without criticism to
the orders of dictators. For many people, alas, this freedom
of mind and spirit is still abridged and denied, but who can
view this main course of history and doubt that it is leading
to ever more intellectual and spiritual freedom for the com-
mon man?

The scientific evolutionist reviews a billion years of past
evolution and looks forward to perhaps another billion years
of evolution in the future. He knows that evolution has not
always been progressive 3 that there have been many eddies
and back currents in the stream of progress, and that the main
current has sometimes meandered in many directions 5 and yet

FREEDOM

1 88

he knows that on the whole it has moved forward. Through
all the ages evolution has been leading toward wider and freer
intellectual horizons, broader social outlooks, and the more
invigorating moral atmosphere of the great sea of truth.

And yet there is no possibility of attaining absolute freedom
for the individual or for society. As individuals we are hedged
about by limitations of heredity and environment beyond which
we cannot pass. No human beings, not even rulers or auto-
crats, are absolutely free in body, mind, or spirit. Freedom has
its necessary limitations, and yet within those limits mankind
has been, through all the ages, attaining to the largest pos-
sible degree of personal freedom. In similar manner, no society
is perfectly free; indeed, society is possible only by placing
limitations upon personal freedom in the interests of the gen-
eral welfare, and different social organizations can exist only
by recognizing the rights of other organizations.

Life itself is possible only by preserving balance between
the organism and its environment, between anabolism, or
building-up processes, and catabolism, or breaking-down proc-
esses; between heredity, or that which is inborn, and environ-
ment, or the conditions under which we develop. Every living
thing is as delicately balanced between contrasting principles
or opposing forces as a tightrope walker passing over Niagara
Gorge — loss of balance means death, and all death is due to
loss of balance or adjustment in this perilous business of liv-
ing. In similar manner, intellectual life depends upon the
preservation of balance between instincts and intelligence, emo-
tion and reason. Social life and progress consist in preserving
a proper balance between the individual and society, liberty
and duty, freedom and responsibility. We forever sail the nar-
row sea between Scylla and Charybdis, and on either coast
lies destruction of life, sanity, society. The only way of safety
is the via media. Extremes of individualism or socialism, of
democracy or autocracy, of anarchy or slavery, are equally
fatal to social organization and progress. We hear much of
late about the equalization of opportunities for individuals in
our society, but little about the equalization of responsibilities;
much about the rights of man and little about the duties of

EDWIN GRANT CONKLIN

189

man. The American Revolution emphasized the rights of man;
we need a new revolution to emphasize the duties of citizens.

Everywhere organization means differentiation and integra-
tion, that is, specialization and co-operation. These are the com-
panion principles of all progress, whether it be the develop-
ment of an animal from an egg or the development of society
from separate individuals. In the development of an egg dif-
ferentiated cells, tissues, and organs appear, but all of these
are integrated so that they work together in the larger life of
the animal. Such a biological individual is the most perfect type
of organization known to man and hence it is called an organ-
ism. The association of individuals in society is a much more
recent product of evolution and a much less perfect form of
organization. Therefore the organization of the animal body
has always been regarded as the ideal for the organization of
society. This was the theme of the ancient fable of the quarrel
between the belly and the members, and it is the basis of PauPs
exhortation to the Romans and the Corinthians regarding what
the biologist today calls “the organism as a whole,” or holism:

Now are they many members, yet but one body. And the eye
cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the
head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much more those
members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.
. . * And whether one member suffer, all members suffer with it;
or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. —
I Cor. 12:20-26.

This integration of the members is brought about in our
own bodies by the fact that all parts of our bodies are devel-
oped from a single germ and have never been completely
separated; also by the fact that all parts are bound together
by common circulation of food, oxygen, and hormones or chem-
ical messengers, as well as by a common nervous system.

Such a perfect organization as that which is found in the
human body, where all the parts co-operate to serve the indi-
vidual as a whole, has never been attained in any society,
though it is approximated in the societies of ants, bees, and
wasps, where the social bonds are largely instincts and hor-

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190

mones. These are also the fundamental bonds in human so-
ciety, but here the instincts have been weakened by intelli-
gence and reason with resulting freedom from rigid mechan-
ical responses of the organism to the various conditions of life.
But while this leads to a less perfect social union than in the
case of the ants and bees, it is also much more flexible .and
adaptable. For example, the colonies of ants have not improved
during the past three million years of which there are records
in the fossil amber from the Baltic; whereas human societies
have undergone vast increase and improvement during the
eight or ten thousand years of recorded history. Intelligence
is much more variable than instinct — “Many men have many
minds” — but this variability is a great factor in progress by
the methods of trial and error and finally trial and success.
The method of experiment, made possible by this very flexi-
bility and adaptability of the bonds of society, is the best assur-
ance of future progress.

Democratic freedom in society does not mean absolute free-
dom, for this would be anarchy. The normal cells of the body
are free to do that which they are capable of doing under the
integrating influence of hormones. When such integration is
lost, cells grow and increase without limit, and thus tumors
and cancers are formed, which lead to the death of the whole
body unless such lawless cells are eliminated. Social anarchy,
no less than cell anarchy, leads to the death of society if un-
controlled. Social freedom does not mean “freedom from law,”
but “freedom under law.” A free society is based upon the
free expression of the will of the majority. “Free governments
derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The founders of this government recognized fully the dan-
gers of popular rule, and they hedged about the possibilities
of autocratic rule by a system of checks and balances between
the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the govern-
ment. They recognized the dangers of an ignorant majority,
and therefore they provided for free, and later compulsory,
education of citizens. In spite of these precautions, free govern-
ment does not always work successfully. The rule of the masses

EDWIN GRANT CONKLIN I 9 1

is often relatively slow and inefficient as compared with the
rule of a single autocrat. If the major purpose of government
is war, aggression, conquest, or even if it is just mere order
and efficiency, then democracy and liberty are at a disadvan-
tage. But is this the main function of government? Is it not
rather to equalize, as far as is possible, the opportunities and
responsibilities of individuals in society? Is it not one of the
main functions of government to educate individuals for self-
government? Certainly this is the ideal of the government of
children in the family. It is not to impose the will of an auto-
cratic parent, nor to prevent children from making mistakes,
but rather to train them for self-government. And the ideals
of a free government are to train its citizens for the wise use
of freedom. Its methods are those of persuasion rather than
compulsion, of education rather than of dictation. Democracy
is educative for all who share in it. How much we felt this
some time ago, in the conflict regarding the Supreme Court;
the whole country became better acquainted with our system
of government, if it had not been fully acquainted with it
before. Democracy is educative for all who share in it, and
it is for this reason that a a free government is better than a
good government,” as Lincoln wisely said. Autocracy does not
train the masses for intelligent participation in society. By sup-
pression of free thought, free speech, free press, it denies to
the people the information necessary to the formation of intel-
ligent opinion, and by propaganda and war psychology it pro-
motes hatred of other races and nations. By force, terror,
wholesale murder, it compels conformity, and it is therefore
the very antithesis of free government.

Ill

And now I pass on to the second of these fundamental prin-
ciples of democracy and freedom; namely, “equality.” Let us
consider the idea of democratic equality as contrasted with the
natural inequalities of men. There is nothing more evident
than the inherited personal inequalities of men. They are born

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192

white, yellow, black, with great or little mental capacity or
value to society. When the Declaration of Independence held
this truth “to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,”
it certainly did not overlook this other self-evident truth, that
men are by nature not only different but also unequal. How,
then, can we harmonize this apparent contradiction between
democratic equality and natural inequality? I have sometimes
been asked: “Do you believe in democracy ; how then can you
believe in heredity? Do you believe in heredity 5 how then
can you believe in democracy?”

Heredity has always been the strong fortress of aristocracy.
Privileged classes have insisted that they are by nature — that
is, by heredity — superior to others and that this superiority,
with all the privileges and emoluments that go with it are
passed on by heredity to their offspring. But this is an obso-
lete and abandoned view of heredity. It confuses the law of
the inheritance of property with that of the inheritance of per-
sonality $ the law of entail with the law of Mendel. A son may
inherit the property of his father but not his personality.
Under the law of primogeniture the oldest son inherits the
kingdom, titles, privileges of his father in their entirety, but
not his intelligence, character, or personality. In biological in-
heritance the germinal factors, or determining causes of the
traits of the parents, are separated one from another and redis-
tributed to their offspring, so that the latter are mosaics of
ancestral traits. These germinal causes of traits, which are
called “genes,” are usually transmitted unchanged from
parents to children, except that before the union of the male
and female cells in fertilization one-half of the genes of each
germ cell is discarded, and at fertilization the half in the egg
and the half in the sperm come together in a new combina-
tion of genes. So numerous are these genes and so varied are
the results of their reduction by half in each germ cell and
their new combinations in fertilization that no two individuals
who are sexually produced are ever alike. Every individual in
the world — and there are nearly two billion human beings on
this earth — every individual differs from every other one

EDWIN GRANT CONKLIN

*93

hereditarily, unless they happen to have come from a single
fertilized egg. Sometimes it does happen that the fertilized
egg divides into two or more parts having precisely the same
genes and the same inheritance 5 and these then develop into
what are known as “identical twins.” But with that single excep-
tion, no two individuals in the world, of all the two billions
that exist, are identical. Every individual is unique. What a
marvelous thing it is! This is true not only of human beings ;
it is true of all sexually produced organisms. It is the main
purpose of sexual reproduction to produce unique individuals.
So complex is the influence of the genes on one another and
upon the whole process of development that no two indi-
viduals are alike. Consequently the best traits may appear in
parents and be lost in their offspring; genius in an ancestor
may be replaced by incompetence in a descendant. As each
generation must start life anew from the germ cells, so in
every person there is a new combination of inheritance fac-
tors. In the process of reproduction every person gets a “new
deal,” if not always a “square deal.”

When we remember that some of the greatest leaders of
mankind came from humble parents; that the greatest genius
has often had the most lowly origin; that Beethoven’s mother
was a consumptive and his father a confirmed drunkard; that
Schubert’s father was a peasant and his mother a domestic
servant; that Faraday, one of the greatest scientific discoverers
of any age, was born over a stable, his father a poor, sick black-
smith, his mother unable to read or write, and his early edu-
cation obtained in selling newspapers on the streets of Lon-
don and later in working as an apprentice to a bookbinder;
that Pasteur was the son of a tanner; that Lincoln’s father was
a ne’er-do-well and his early surroundings and education most
unpromising; and so on through the long list of names in
which democracy glories— when we remember these, we may
well ask whether biological heredity is not essentially demo-
cratic.

Old Thomas Fuller wrote many years ago in his “Religious
Meditations”:

FREEDOM

194

I find, Lord, the genealogy of my Saviour is strangely checkered
with four remarkable changes in four immediate generations:

Roboam begat Abia, that is a bad father a bad son.

Abia begat Asa, that is a bad father a good son.

Asa begat Josaphat, that is a good father a good son.

Josaphat begat Joram, that is a good father a bad son.

I can see from hence that my father’s piety cannot be entailed;
that is bad news for me. But I see also that actual impiety is not al-
ways hereditary; that is good news for' my son.

It may be objected that I have ended by denying that there
is any inheritance of mental or moral traits, but that is not the
case. While it is true that good and bad hereditary traits are
widely distributed among all men, they are not equally dis-
tributed. On the contrary, the chances of good or bad traits
appearing in offspring are much higher in some families than
in others, but no family has a monopoly of good or bad traits
and no social system can afford to ignore the great personages
that may appear in obscure families or to exalt nonentities to
leadership because they belong to great families. In short,
preferment and distinction should depend upon, individual
worth and not upon family name or fame. This is orthodox
democratic doctrine, but not the faith or practice of aristocracy.

Moreover, democratic equality does not now mean and has
never meant that all men are equal in personality, but rather
that they were created or born equal in their rights to “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” They may later in life
lose this inborn equality of rights by crimes against society,
but democracy and liberty hold that they were born with these
inalienable rights. Democratic equality does mean “Equal Jus-
tice Under Law,” as the motto over the entrance to the Supreme
Court Building in Washington reads; it does mean no special
privilege due to birth; it means freedom to find one’s work
and place in society. It is not a denial of personal inequalities,
but the only genuine recognition of them. On the other hand,
rigid family and class distinctions are denials of individual
distinctions. In short, democratic equality and liberty mean
that every man should be measured by his own merits and not

EDWIN GRANT CONKLIN 1 95

by the merits of some ancestor whose good genes and traits
may have passed to a collateral line.

IV

And finally, what has biology to say in regard to “demo-
cratic fraternity” and its relation to freedom? Biology proves
that we are all cousins, if not brothers. The lines of descent
from innumerable ancestors converge in us and, if we are for-
tunate in having children, they will radiate from us to innu-
merable generations in the future. If the number of our ances-
tors doubled in each ascending generation, as it would do if
the marriage of cousins of various degrees did not take place,
each of us would be descended from more than a billion ances-
tors of a thousand years ago. Of course, there were not that
many people in the whole world a thousand years ago and
consequently there must have been many intermarriages of
relatives, which would greatly reduce the number of ancestors.
Furthermore, many of the general population of that time left
no descendants, so that the possible number of ancestors was
still further reduced. Allowing for numerous intermarriages
of relatives and for many lines that died out, it is highly prob-
able that all the people of English, French, German, and Scan-
dinavian stocks today are descended from one or many com-
mon ancestors of a thousand years ago, and a thousand years
is a relatively short time as measured by the clock of biology.
We are probably no more distantly related than thirtieth
cousins and most of us are much more closely related than
that.

In length of descent we are all equal. Tennyson wrote:

The gardener Adam and his wife
Smile on the claims of long descent.

And in community of descent we are all cousins, if not
brothers. Our lines stretch out to all our race. Each individual
or family is not a separate and independent entity, but rather
a minor unit in the great organism of mankind. Biology and
the Bible agree that “God hath made of one blood all nations

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196

of men.” And not only of one blood, but we know that all
men have the same number of chromosomes, namely, forty-
eight, and very many of their genes are identical, although
some, of course, are different. As a result of this common de-
scent, the resemblances between human beings are much more
numerous and important than their differences. This fact is
especially evident to the biologist, for even the types which
differ most widely, such as the white, yellow, and black races,
are only varieties or subspecies of Homo sapiens, while no
other living creature can be classified in the same genus with
man, or even in the same zoological family.

Racial and varietal differences represent a natural classifica-
tion based upon physical characteristics. There are also un-
doubtedly intellectual and social differences between these
major subdivisions of the species which tend to cause a natural
and desirable social segregation of the races, but while our
instincts lead to such segregation, they do not justify racial
antagonisms. The fundamental instincts of all types of men
are so essentially similar that all may, and often do, live to-
gether in harmony j and the co-operation of all types of men
in organized society is so much a matter of education and
environment that it has been demonstrated again and again,
and nowhere better than in this country, that persons of the
most distinct races may have the same social ideals and may
co-operate in mutual helpfulness in the realization of those
ideals and in the achievement of freedom.

When we come to those minor subdivisions represented by
the so-called “races of Europe,” the natural distinctions are
usually so slight that they form no barrier to the most inti-
mate association and co-operation, unless these races have been
taught to believe the reverse. Most Americans represent a
mixture of English, French, German, Scandinavian, and other
European stocks. I do not know how many of these various
stocks each of you readers can trace in your ancestry, but I
have had some of each of them among my ancestors, since
the time when they came to this country in the early
eighteenth century. In general the results of the mixture of
these stocks have been good, not only physically but also intel-

EDWIN GRANT CONKLIN

l 97

lectually and socially. The inherent antagonisms between these
stocks that agitators and designing politicians tell us about
are really not inherent; they are not born in us but are largely
created, cultivated, and magnified by education and environ-
ment for national and selfish purposes.

Finally, when we come to social class distinctions which are
based only upon occupation, wealth, or social position, we have
the most artificial and unnatural classification of all; and the
antagonisms between these classes, which are engendered and
fomented by designing agitators, are not only noninstinctive,
but usually anti-instinctive and utterly irrational. This is not
to say that men should not associate in congenial groups which
have common interests and ideals. Such associations are natural
and inevitable. But when attempts are made to array one
group or class against another and to make these classes per-
manent and hereditary, an artificial disharmony is introduced
into society which has no basis in biology, and can work only
disastrously and enslave mankind.

Because of the fundamental resemblances among all classes
and races of men, and especially because of similarity of their
emotions, education and environment can make it possible for
all men of good will to understand and sympathize with one
another. No more effective means of promoting social har-
mony and freedom is possible than this ability to understand
and sympathize and, in thought, to put one’s self in another’s
position. If this teaching of biological fraternity were to be
generally appreciated and practiced, it would largely end the
social conflicts that afflict mankind. The three democratic
graces are liberty, equality, fraternity, and the greatest of these
is liberty.

V

No reasonable person can deny that real, as contrasted with
ideal, democracy often falls short of these high ideals, and that
freedom is often unachieved. No doubt democracy is often
disorderly and inefficient, and is sometimes betrayed by selfish
politicians and grafters, but sooner or later — where we have
freedom of criticism, freedom of the press, freedom of educa-

1 98 FREEDOM

tion — sooner or later we “turn the rascals out.” Dictatorships
do not escape these evils and they do not train the masses for
intelligent participation in government. Democracy rests upon
a broad base and is relatively stable 5 autocracy is like a pyra-
mid balanced upon its apex, and sooner or later it ends in dis-
aster. Democracy contributes more than any other social sys-
tem to the lasting peace, progress, and freedom of a people.
It brings a message of hope and inspiration to all classes and
conditions of men. It inspires youth with visions and living
examples of

“Some divinely gifted man
Whose life in low estate began
And on a simple village green.”

This is the faith which fired the souls of our fathers and led
them to establish this great republic, and these are some of the
reasons for concluding that there are no sufficient biological
or social evidences that democracy and liberty have been out-
grown and must be abandoned. On the contrary, in the pres-
ent crisis in the history of the world, it is for us who have
experienced the blessings of liberty highly to resolve that
“government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.”

Alvin Johnson

Director of the New School for Social Research

ACADEMIC FREEDOM

A CADEMIC freedom is the youngest born of human
f \ liberties. Classical antiquity knew nothing of it, al-
Jl JL though freedom of speech, freedom to inquire and
write, even the private person’s freedom to teach, were appre-
ciated and struggled for in Greece as early as the time of
Pericles. Organized institutions for the instruction of the child
and adolescent existed throughout the Hellenistic world and
later, the Roman Empire. There could, however, be no ques-
tion of freedom for the teacher, as he had set ideals to incul-
cate, set accomplishments to achieve. Indeed, neither Greeks
nor Romans found anything unnatural in manning a school
with teachers who were slaves.

Nor could there be any question of academic freedom in
the medieval and early modern universities. They were pri-
marily theological schools, and every teacher, however learned,
had to be on his guard against charges of heresy. Since the
theologians took all knowledge for their private domain, any
departure in any field might give rise to the charge of heresy-
witness Galileo. The assertion of academic freedom had to
await the secularization of knowledge, and had indeed to fol-
low this secularization from afar. The enlightenment of the
late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries was the work
of laymen, not holders of university posts — Hobbes, Locke,
Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, the Encyclopedists. Kant was
an exception to this rule — under the enlightened despotism of

199

200

FREEDOM

Frederick the Great. Frederick was himself an amateur of
the Enlightenment, and by his example a limited sphere of
academic freedom became traditional in Germany. In the Brit-
ish universities of the later eighteenth century the professors
escaped oppression by the effective device of aloofness from
burning issues, an aloofness that maintained itself far into
the nineteenth century and left it to laymen like Ricardo,
Bentham, the Mills, Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, to advance the
revolution in thought that brought the modern scientific age
to maturity. Neither had America, in spite of her enthusiasm
for liberty, any concern for academic freedom as such. Well
past the middle of the nineteenth century the colleges re-
mained chiefly under the domination of the churches. Aca-
demic security of tenure depended on conformity and innocu-
ousness, and the infiltration of modern scientific conceptions
into the American mind came by way of lay reading circles
and lyceums, not by way of the institutions of learning. The
ideal of academic liberty first took root with the establishment
of the Johns Hopkins University in the seventies. It was an
ideal imported from Germany, and many years were to pass
before it could become even fairly acclimated.

The essence of academic freedom is the right of the duly
qualified scholar to carry on research, teaching, and publication
without restraint or interference by the institution which em-
ploys him. As citizen of a free state he has indeed the right
to carry on these activities without restraint or interference on
the part of the public authorities^ but the civil guaranties alone
are insufficient to make the scholar free in his pursuit of the
truth. His ability to function as a scholar depends as a rule
upon his continued occupancy of his academic post 5 hence,
without specific guaranties against arbitrary or disciplinary
dismissal his civil liberties are nugatory. It is therefore not
strange that the movement for academic freedom centers in
security of tenure, nor that to many who view the matter cur-
sorily academic liberty and security of tenure mean the same
thing, even though the establishment of security of tenure in
itself is virtually the creation of a property right rather than
the realization of a form of personal liberty.

ALVIN JOHNSON 201

Like all emerging rights academic freedom is premised upon
social utility. From the time of the Enlightenment faith in
science as a solvent of human problems remained all but uni-
versal among intelligent men, until the schism inaugurated
by the precursors of Fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism. Apart from
the political-mystical schismatics of Germany, Italy, and Rus-
sia, all intelligent men still recognize that the realm of science
is as wide as human experience and human life. If it is to fulfill
its mission science can recognize no limitations, no reserved
areas. It follows that no restrictions may be placed upon the
scientist in his pursuit of truth without endangering the whole
structure of science, and threatening a retrogression toward pri-
mordial ignorance. Anyone who is alive to the achievements
of science in the past, and aware of the immense unexplored
fields lying ahead of us, will necessarily demand for the scholar
the fullest measure of academic freedom.

As indicated above, academic freedom is often confused with
academic security of tenure as such — a property conception.
The distinction turns on the purity of devotion of the scholar
to the principles underlying scientific advance. The scholar who
has ceased to function in his pursuit of truth, the scholar who
accepts extraneous and irrelevant considerations in the selec-
tion and promotion of colleagues, the scholar who binds him-
self to subject his opinions and expression to the pronounce-
ments of a party or sect, have placed themselves outside of the
realm in which they can properly invoke the defense of aca-
demic liberty. There may be valid reasons why they should
still enjoy security of tenure, but these are of another order,
analogous to other property rights.

Academic freedom, like all other liberties, implies a corre-
sponding responsibility: the responsibility for advancing science
by whatever means are available. It implies further the will-
ingness to make sacrifices. The man who is prepared to serve
the Lord if the Lord will assure immunity is no special asset
to the Lord’s cause. The man who will stand for academic
freedom if he is guaranteed against all risk is not an able sea-
man in this voyage into an unknown sea of rights and duties.

In the totalitarian states academic freedom has been abol-

202

FREEDOM

ished. The single-minded pursuit of science has given way to
the prostitution of science and teaching to the needs or fancied
rules of the all-pervading political power. In the democratic-
liberal states academic freedom is accepted, at least formally,
by the leaders of the intellectual world. It has not, however,
been accepted in all its implications. In our greater universities
security of tenure is nearly absolute, for those who have at-
tained to professorial position. There is unfortunately no Hip-
pocratic oath binding upon faculty members and administrators
alike that compels them to follow the ideals of academic free-
dom in the selection of new members. Considerations wholly
irrelevant to scholarship — considerations of social status, polit-
ical inclinations, religion, race — are almost universally given
weight. Such considerations are also often controlling in the
promotion of faculty members, in the provision of laboratories,
libraries, and other necessary instruments of effective research.

The confusion in American educational thought as to the
character and meaning of academic freedom is in part due to
the failure to differentiate clearly between the education — or
training — of the child and adolescent, and the education of
research worker and scholar. The American tradition, wisely
or unwisely, insists upon a specific pattern of training for the
young, a specifically selected material. A sturdy and tenacious
common sense holds it as self-evident that many of the prob-
lems with which science must deal are not proper pabulum for
babes and sucklings, nor yet for adolescents. In so far as uni-
verity education — essentially the education of apprentices in
scholarship — is merged with adolescent education, school with
college and college with university — it is difficult to apply the
principles of academic freedom in all their purity.

More important, however, as a source of confusion is the
invasion or threatened invasion of academic freedom by non-
academic forces indifferent to the principle and its social sig-
nificance. Every educational institution suffers from weak
defenses on the side of its finances. Whether it derives its
revenues from private endowments or from government, it
must frequently tremble before the power of the purse. Often
it trembles even when the purse lies quiescent in unabated

ALVIN JOHNSON 203

benevolence. A university may often ease out of his position a
provocative professor, or refuse to appoint an able and distin-
guished man, because the administration fears, without founda-
tion, that a wealthy donor might be repelled or a state legis-
lature alienated.

As against the forces making for restrictions upon academic
freedom we may note the forces making for its defense. There
is a growing esprit de corps among the professors of most uni-
versities that makes trouble for the board or president who
attacks the academic freedom of any faculty member. Still
more important, there is an interuniversity organization of
professors that investigates, reports, and condemns in case it
finds that academic freedom has been violated. Such a con-
demnation may not save a professor who has been unjustly
threatened with dismissal, but it affects severely the prestige
of the institution in which the outrage occurs, lames its ability
to secure first-rate men, and weakens its hold upon the gen-
eral public. Few university administrators will lightly incur
the infamy of a clear-cut violation of academic freedom. In
some cases an unwelcome professor may be got rid of on
charges of personal conduct which in the ordinary case would
pass unnoticed 3 but even such cases are relatively rare. The
main reliance of academic oppression is upon selection. Few
men may expect university appointment unless they can present
a clean bill of health for “safety and sanity.” And at the age
when men secure professorial appointment, future behavior
may be predicted with a high degree of certainty.

Recognizing as we must that academic freedom is too new
a conception to have gained such general acceptance as most
civil liberties, that it is often not clearly understood even by
those who invoke it, that it is too often honored in the breach,
yet one whose memory encompasses even three or four decades
of American educational history will agree that the scope of
academic freedom has extended steadily, allowance made for
setbacks in time of war and threatened war. It may be antici-
pated that more and more universities will codify their prac-
tice into charters which will establish academic freedom upon
a sound footing. It may be in point to cite here, by way of illus-

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204

tration, the most recent constitution of a faculty, the Graduate
Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School for
Social Research:

I — The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New
School for Social Research is founded upon the principles of aca-
demic freedom and the rights and duties implicit in freedom of
thought, inquiry, teaching and publication. Among the implications
of these principles the following are especially acknowledged by
the Faculty and its members as binding upon them:

(1) Every member of the Faculty as a scholar accepts the obli-
gation to follow the truth wherever it may lead, regardless of
personal consequences.

(2) No member of the Faculty can be a member of any political
party or group which asserts the right to dictate in matters of
science or scientific opinion.

(3) The Faculty and its individual members bind themselves, in
all official action, especially in elections to the Faculty or in
promotion of members, to be guided solely by considerations of
scholarly achievement, competence and integrity.

It is agreed that in the decisions of the Faculty scientifically
irrelevant considerations such as race, religion or political beliefs
shall be given no weight whatsoever, so long as these represent
no bar upon individual freedom of thought, inquiry, teaching
and publication.

II — The Faculty shall consist of Professors and Assistant Professors,
whose tenure runs for two years or more and who serve full time
through the academic year. The Faculty may also appoint Visit-
ing Professors and Lecturers, with or without salary, and may
grant them a seat in the Faculty, with or without voting power.

III — The Faculty thus constituted shall be a self-governing body,
under the educational laws of New York and under the princi-
ples set forth in Section I. It shall vote its own by-laws, elect its
own Dean and other officers and lay out a curriculum not incon-
sistent with the educational laws of the State of New York. The
Faculty shall elect all Professors, Assistant Professors, Lecturers
and other staff members. Within the budget all salaries shall be
fixed by the Faculty. The Faculty alone shall have power of dis-
missal of members of the Faculty and staff, but only on grounds
of non-fulfillment of their academic duties, of repudiation of the
principles set forth in Section I or on grounds touching upon
scientific honor and integrity.

ALVIN JOHNSON 20 $

IV — The Graduate Faculty shall be empowered to raise funds by
the solicitation of contributions and by tuition charges. Such funds
shall be held in the custody of a special body of trustees, created
by the Board of Trustees of the New School for Social Research,
and shall be disbursed upon the order of such officer or officers
as the Graduate Faculty may elect from time to time for such
purposes.

It will be noted that in this constitution equal stress is laid
upon the rights and duties implicit in academic freedom. The
faculty member binds himself, as by a Hippocratic oath, to
follow the truth regardless of personal consequences ; to hold
aloof from organizations that would curtail his freedom; to
disregard considerations irrelevant to scholarship in every deci-
sion affecting his colleagues. Instead of having a tenure estab-
lished by a nonacademic board, members of the Faculty are
appointed, promoted, or dismissed by the Faculty itself. The
power of dismissal, however, may be exercised only on charges
pertinent to scholarship. The Faculty itself is endowed with
the power to raise funds, a power that would be exercised in
case the trustees sought to invade the academic freedom of the
Faculty.

The Graduate Faculty has operated under this constitution
for only six years, a period too brief for a test under severe
stress. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that a body of scholars
of highly individualistic personalities has operated through six
years frictionlessly and co-operatively, and that the rights and
duties set forth in the constitution have been scrupulously ob-
served. They have become an essential part of the moral life
of the Faculty. Every member is prepared not only to observe
them, but to fight for them, suffer for them. And these are
the tests of a right that really lives.

Frank Kingdon

President of Newark University

FREEDOM FOR EDUCATION

T HE whole process of evolution has been marked by
casualties as organisms developed at certain stages
have not been able to adjust themselves to environ-
mental changes. In other words, the mere existence of a certain
species is no guarantee of its survival. There has to be main-
tained an equilibrium in the rhythm of adjustment or an inhos-
pitable change in the environment destroys the organism. When
species lose their capacity for modification they are destroyed.
When they are slower at change than their environment, they
either begin to degenerate or have to take a lower place in the
organic hierarchy or pass away. An organism that does not
keep pace in itself with environmental change is lost.

Left to its own devices, nature has produced at every stage
of the universe’s history those organisms which were adapted
to each stage. The process of rejection has been a ruthless one,
but at any given moment, the whole picture has been har-
monious. The forms of life that fit the world as it is are the
ones that exist in the world as it is.

I

The emergence of man precipitates a new factor into the
situation. He does not leave nature to itself. By the interven-
tion of his intelligence he changes his own environment. He
speeds up the processes of change in the world to which he

206

FRANK KINGDON

207

must adjust himself. This means that he creates a new hazard
for his own survival. If he himself does not change at a pace
that keeps him within hailing distance of the changes he is
making in his world, his own success in mastering that world
will destroy him.

Education is an instrument of survival. It is man’s attempt
to keep individuals up to date with their world, to make indi-
viduals adequate to living in and dealing with their environ-
ment. It is society at any stage engaged in molding individuals
to fit the current social forms.

One difficulty is that, while the intelligence initiates social
changes, it cannot comprehensively forecast their effects. They
have their own momentum and work almost as impersonally
and as independently as natural forces. The intelligence gives
the impetus, but it sets in motion forces that then work out
their own nature and take their own heads to achieve their own
results. Man finds himself confronted by a dual task, that of
understanding and controlling nature, and that of understand-
ing and controlling the social complex which he himself has
created as his own environment. At the moment, the second
control is even more difficult than the first, because we have
not yet been able to devise an intellectual method for reducing
social dynamics to scientific formulas. We know that social
forces work by their own laws, but we cannot yet define those
laws. We have not reached the point where we can accurately
and comprehensively predict the social effects of any given in-
vention, of any political policy, or of any major social event.
This makes both social decision and education essentially
opportunistic.

An important factor that complicates social interpretation is
the potentially powerful one of individuality. It is true that
every man is a social product, but it is also true that each is
unique, and while the area of uniqueness in all men may be a
restricted one, in some it is large enough so that their distinc-
tively unique individualities become powerful agents of change.
It may be possible to show that every genius is a combination
and expression of ideas and tendencies prevalent in his time,
but it still remains a fact that they were precipitated in him at

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208

just the time and place they were because he was the individual
he was and not* another. We have no way of knowing when
this kind of individual will appear, or where. Nature and so-
ciety are continually surprising us by presenting us with unex-
pected human talents from unlikely places.

Another difficulty is that between periods of major social
crisis our social forms become organized into institutions that
are comparatively rigid in practice and dogma, and that accu-
mulate to themselves extraordinarily powerful prestiges. They
represent both tradition and vested interests. Powerful and
selfish men have a stake in their continuance, many people
have an emotional attachment to them, and all the strength of
our natural apathy tends to maintain them. Consequently,
when a period of major social reconstruction comes, they gather
all their resources to resist it. The forces of change cannot be
stopped, however, and so a period of intense struggle ensues
in the course of which institutions are either modified or
smashed. As the rate of social change is accelerated, it becomes
more and more difficult for more and more institutions to
adjust themselves to it. Consequently, in a society growing
steadily more complex we have wars and revolutions on con-
sistently greater scales. The increasing magnitudes of events of
violence are symptoms of the more comprehensive extensions
of social dynamics.

This is an important comment because it indicates one fact
that is clearly characteristic of our current social trends. They
are making our social units, in terms of which we have to think
consistently, more inclusive. Every fresh experience pushes out
the boundaries of our common interests. For five thousand years
our key institutions have been enlarging. The family has
merged into the tribe and the city; the tribe and the city have
grown into states and principalities; states and principalities
have been combined into nations; and nations have expanded
into federations and empires. These enlarged units have been
not merely political contrivances, but vital foci of cultural de-
velopment.

More and more inclusive units of society, however, demand
more and more expansive individuals to operate them. Men

FRANK KINGDOM

209

cannot stop with tribal loyalties and yet keep a nation going,
for the larger unit will split on rivalries among the lesser
units. Individuals must extend their intelligences and imagina-
tions to identify themselves with the expanding borders of
their social unities.

Such an extension on the part of men does not come natu-
rally. Each of us is essentially provincial. It has always re-
quired an effort to lift men out of their local loyalties into
wider ones. A man can always be interested in himself. He
can identify himself with his family, but even here he does
not maintain the same intensity or consistency of interest that
he does in his own personal affairs. Beyond the family, his
identification is spasmodic. Its intensity is proportionate to his
feeling of emergency. He will rally to his city and his nation
if he feels that they are in danger or on the threshold of glory,
but for the rest of the time he is comparatively indifferent,
and even critical and restive. Our emotional reserves seem to
be limited, and therefore to be exhausted by our immediate
preoccupations. We are left with the question whether men
can go beyond a certain provincialism of outlook, but we at
least have the encouragement of knowing that when they are
convinced that their interests demand their identification with
a group as large as a modern nation they have been able to
achieve it.

The achievement of extension also runs into the obstacle of
man’s natural apathy. Something in us resists change. We are
sufficiently of the physical world so that its tendency to inertia
is characteristic of us. There are always those who anticipate
what is coming and seek to prepare men for it; but the mass
of humanity does not move until events leave no alternative.
Consequently, w r e go along on a series of sharply distinguished
plateaus instead of a steady rise of change. We maintain a level
of life as long as we can, and then we have to go through
some sort of crisis of effort to establish a new one. At each level
we pitch our tents and act as though we had found our final
establishment. No easy answer can be given to the question
whether men can throw off their natural apathy, become intel-

210

FREEDOM

ligently aware of their changing environment, and act con-
sistently to modify their own outlooks and their institutions
to meet the demands of change.

11

In our contemporary world man has made the whole planet
one unified environment. Communications have erased bound-
ary lines from our nonpolitical experience. We actually live
our days and do our thinking against the wide perspective of
the whole round earth. Nothing happens anywhere that is not
at once reported to us. The widening circles of social relation-
ships that have carried us from family to tribe to nation to
empire now embrace the whole company of mankind and pre-
sent us with the fact that every child now born has the whole
world for his stage. As a fact in experience, we are citizens
of one city of planetary dimensions knit together in a web of
transportation and communication that makes any movement
anywhere felt throughout the entire social structure even to
the ends of the earth.

To illustrate what this means let us think of the cultural
forces that have been most powerful in our American life over
the period of the past twenty-five years. I think that a strong
thesis could be maintained on the proposition that the most
influential stimulants of our creative thinking have been not
native but foreign in their origins. Such names as Kagawa of
Japan, Sun Yat Sen of China, Lenin of Russia, Marx of Ger-
many, Croce of Italy, Bergson and Stendhal and Proust of
France, Gandhi of India, Shaw and Wells and Barrie of Brit-
ain, Joyce and Yeats and Moore of Ireland, immediately come
to mind as active ferments in our thinking. Men like Stalin
and Chiang Kai-shek, Mussolini and Hitler, are so much a
part of our experiences that even their gray shadows flicker-
ing on a screen in a dark theater divide a crowd into cheering
and hissing partisans. Men and ideas are no longer remote
because they are foreign. They are emotional symbols quick
in the blood of the actual world in which we choose our friends
and select our parties. The planet is our field of force.

FRANK KINGDON

21 I

Meanwhile, however, our institutions remain parochial. They
were established in the days when boundaries actually shut
men in by keeping strangers out. Economically, educationally,
religiously, and militarily we are organized on provincial lines.
Our currencies are national. Our business organizations are
“American companies” or “British” or “French” or “German”
firms. Our schools are organized around specific nationalistic
traditions. Churches are shaped to the national societies that
they serve. Armies and navies are almost by definition weapons
of provincial groups. The powerful institutional patterns, in-
cluding, be it noted, the effective learned societies, of our social
behavior are all molded into the forms of those divided group
interests that come to us out of the days before the world had
become one community.

As we have indicated, the most commanding of all our insti-
tutions is the sovereign national state. It puts its stamp upon
practically every one of our activities. So great is its prestige
that it has become virtually sacred, demanding undivided alle-
giance from its citizens, and thundering anathemas upon any
who question its dogmas. It seems so normal to us for the
world to be organized into nations that we may wonder why
anyone should even raise a question about it. This simply em-
phasizes the almost incalculable strength that this compara-
tively young institution has acquired. Men have in the past
thought about the Emperor, the Church, or the City, as we now
think about the Nation. It is at this moment the most strongly
entrenched social unit, carrying over into our cosmopolitan
environment all the emotional and institutional investments it
stored up in a more provincial era.

Here, then, is the basic tension of our times. In actual ex-
perience we are world-citizens but the institutions by which
we live are provincial. We are like children growing up in
a home that speaks a language foreign to that of the surround-
ing community. Within our institutions we use the tongue of
our restricted group, but when we cross their thresholds we
find ourselves facing conditions for which our provincial speech
has no meaning. Either we shall have to adjust our traditional

212

FREEDOM

organizations to the new dimensions of experience or else the
course of events will smash them.

An excellent parable of what this means is the story of Japan,
For centuries this island empire lived its exclusive life in a
world divided into neighborhoods having restricted dealings
one with another. In the middle of the last century, however,
boats driven by steam turned the oceans into convenient high-
ways, and the restricted neighborhood known as Japan found
its waters invaded by continually increasing numbers of vis-
itors. It could not shut them out. They were emissaries of a
new age that automatically suspended traditional relationships.
The proud nationalism of Japan, rooted in religious concepts
and absolute in its assumptions of superiority, had to come to
terms with the world-community. The Son of Heaven could
no longer enjoy his disdainful isolation. What has happened
so obviously to Japan has actually happened to the whole insti-
tution of nationalism, even though we have not seen it so
clearly. Just as the world of the Renaissance moved in upon
the medieval Church and shook it to its foundations, so the
international community has advanced upon nationalism in our
day, forcing us to a new orientation of all our institutions in
the light of our new experiences. The origin of our contem-
porary chaos is the fact that our traditional patterns of social
organization are incapable of solving our problems on the
scale of our new frames of social experience. They carry over
provincial imperatives into a community of planetary dimen-
sions. Either they will be refashioned by intelligent planning
or else they will be destroyed by revolution.

The difficulty with planning institutional change is that in-
stitutions are habits and vested interests as well as social tools,
and so they gather to themselves the almost imponderable
support of apathy. When change threatens, men rally to the
support of the traditional. This is happening now. In a period
when we are obviously becoming more cosmopolitan we are
seeing a resurgence of almost fanatical nationalism. At first
glance, this may seem paradoxical. It really is not. It is a phe-
nomenon as elemental as the clustering of sheep in their fold
when a thunderstorm threatens. We naturally retreat from

FRANK KINGDON

213

the novel into the familiar because the novel is a threat and
the familiar is assurance of security. Trained to provincial think-
ing we literally do not know what to do with a unified world.
In our bewilderment we seek refuge in exalting old patterns
of life. Institutions menaced by unprecedented forces mobilize
to perpetuate themselves. Nationalism is now doing just this.
Fascism is nationalism making its last desperate stand against
the tide of events. In its emergency it gets the support of busi-
nessmen, of the military, of the majority of churchmen, and
of most educators, because all these live by activities them-
selves rooted in nationalism. Scenting the approaching storm
the sheep herd in the fold. They are grateful to the shepherd
who speaks the bold and encouraging word, and they follow
him without question whithersoever he leads them.

Ours is the generation that is consummating the end of the
era of exclusive nationalism. Our whole society is in the throes
of giving birth to a world order. The beginning of the end
of the old epoch came with the outbreak of the Great War,
significantly called the World War, in 1914. November, 1918,
produced what has been truly called the Armistice, for it was
no cessation of hostilities 5 these have been continuing in scat-
tered areas of the earth through the intervening twenty years
and are now apparently gaining force for another concentrated
struggle involving all nations. Dimly the spirit of the new day
shadowed itself forth in the League of Nations, but the incubus
of old forms was too heavy for it to carry, so that it broke down
under the strain of rival national claims. We have already had
a war for twenty-five years, sporadic and scattered but continu-
ous. Every sign indicates that, as in past crises, our world re-
organization will require a thirty years’ war. All that this means
is that it takes thirty years for an old generation wedded to
traditional forms to pass away, and a new generation to rise in
its place facing its own environment in its own terms.

Thus our struggle is more profound than most of us realize.
We have upset the historic equilibrium of countries, races, and
continents. Ours is more than a contest between traditional
democracy and fascism or communism. It is the death of an old
order and the birth of a new. The Hitlers, the Mussolinis, and

FREEDOM

214

the Stalins are symbols of a vanishing day, resolutely and ruth-
lessly using all its accumulated reserves of material and emotion
to fight off the annihilation it bitterly fears. They are incidents,
and events are more than they are. Society is on the march
toward a new stage of comprehensive organization, a stage as
definite as the emergence of tribe from family, of nation from
tribe, of empire from nation. We are on the threshold of a
federation of the world. Our institutions are persistent but out-
dated, and their vigor in resisting change is the measure of the
intensity of our struggle.

I I I

Two questions clearly emerge from our analysis. Are indi-
vidual men capable of identifying themselves with the whole
race of mankind in the common quest for life? Is mankind able
to develop institutions capable of supporting the new world
structure of experience? Neither can be answered simply.

As individuals we are not fully contemporaneous with our
own world. We have not caught up with our technical achieve-
ments. Man has learned how to change his environment but not
himself, so that we have no modern men to match the modern
world. Perhaps we can put it in another way. The characteristic
of our technical advance has been extension, the inclusion of
wider and wider areas within interdependent units, but the chief
trait of individual men is still preoccupation with egocentric
interests, the exaltation of the premise of the provincial. In an
environment that is continually approximating an organic pat-
tern of mutually dependent cells, individual men are still think-
ing and acting as though they, the cell units, were independent
entities sufficient unto themselves and answerable to no law save
that of self-interest narrowly defined. We have not learned to
include the fact of mutual dependence and the desirable virtue
of mutual aid as effective motives in our behavior. Man impov-
erishes man, class exploits and hates class, nation rises against
nation, race persecutes race. In human relationships we perpetu-
ate and even exacerbate our divisions while every technical ad-
vance draws us physically closer together in a shrinking world.

FRANK KINGDON

215

We are not emotionally prepared for our new proximities. The
lion and the lamb are being forced to lie down together before
the lion has learned to eat straw like the ox.

In a sense, we are not even contemporaneous with ourselves.
On the technical side we are twentieth-century men and from a
strictly rational point of view we can perceive the implications
of our new devices. We are not exclusively rational beings,
however, and in the recesses of our complex inheritances move
impulses of the long past. Nineteenth-century ideas are obvi-
ously powerful in each of us, and few can deny the active pres-
ence of medieval superstitions in certain kinds of decisions. We
are not fully up-to-date with ourselves, for part of each of us
is still untamed. Our highly technical success, as a matter of
fact, has made this extraordinarily clear to us. The work of a
man like Freud, for example, is an expression of the way in
which the continuing savage in man has been thrown into bold
relief by the demands of an increasingly complex society. An
essentially primitive man can use the radio, the automobile, the
aeroplane, with a skill at least equal to that of a man of culture,
but none of them will add one cubit to his spiritual stature.
There is a realm of technical achievement and there is one of
cultural insight, but there is little evidence that progress in one
means advance in the other. This truth has its own poignancy
at this moment when we see civilization exercising an unprece-
dented power over the physical world, and yet reverting to
virtual barbarism in the group relations within its own structure.

Having said this, however, we have to balance it by remem-
bering that men have shown the capacity to enlarge their loyal-
ties effectively enough to give periodic stability to broadening
social units. The citizen of San Francisco feels himself one with,
the citizen of New York in the bonds of a common country.
The man of Toronto identifies himself with the whole British
Commonwealth of Nations. These mark unpredictable advances
beyond the family loyalties of early men. I have occasionally
met Christians deeply conscious of the spiritual ties that unite
them to all “members of the Body of Christ”; and I know
individuals who identify themselves completely with the world-
wide proletariat. These may seem delusions to such as do not

FREEDOM

2l6

understand them, but they show that human beings are capable
of finding satisfactions in human fellowships convincing to
them, even though founded upon almost nebulous areas of
common interest.

Our answer, then, to the question of man’s ability to identify
himself with mankind is that there are obvious inherent ob-
stacles but that his power of emotional extension has already
been proved to be so great that we are not justified in believing
that it has been exhausted. I should sum up my conclusions in
the matter in two statements and a comment. First, the mere
success of techniques will not automatically produce men mor-
ally capable of handling them; the two kinds of success are
distinct. Second, this being so, we must face the problem of
producing comprehensive men as an essential one upon the
solution of which depends our whole social success ; we might
go so far as to say that the necessity of the case demands that
the next field of knowledge to be explored shall be man’s
knowledge of himself, and that we cannot claim to be genuinely
scientific until the science of humanity is brought to the level
of our knowledge of the physical world. The comment I should
like to make is that a critical social emergency may make it so
clear to us that the mutual advantage of all is the personal
advantage of each — though the realization is more likely to
come as a general disaster plainly a threat against personal
security — that we shall be shocked out of our provincialism and
find personal interest allied with collective good so plainly that
we shall be forced to stand together. Where slow persuasion
fails an emotional panic may succeed.

The possibility of refashioning institutions depends some-
what but not altogether on what we have just discussed. Men
must think of themselves as world-citizens before they will give
attention to designing the machinery of a world-state, but our
social organizations have their own vitalities and rhythms of
metamorphosis. At certain points they act like entities in their
own natures, and at some stages they mold men more effectively
than men affect them; Frankenstein may be a caricature but he
is not a myth.

The aboriginal tribalist in all of us dies uneasily, so that there

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217

is a tendency in every articulated group to take to itself the
ancient prerogatives of the tribe. Each has its totem, its vows,
its peculiar patois, and its formula for its own justification.
Given any length of life the tradition of any group lends it
an aura of sanctity, which means a command of the emotional
investments of its members. This produces powerful resistance
to criticism and rejection of proposals for change as though they
were utterances of blasphemy. This emotional tenacity of insti-
tutions is the source of their social lag. They continue until
they become slums of the spirit in a transformed society, and
even then all housing projects that would displace them are re-
jected by their inhabitants, who cannot bear to see the old
premises dismantled.

Intellectually, it is not too difficult to draw the blueprints of
an orderly world community. Here are two thousand million
people living on one of the lesser planets of a comparatively
undistinguished stellar system. At their command are certain
computable resources which, with their labor and knowledge,
they could exploit to assure food, clothing, shelter, and a degree
of comfort for all. The technics of production and communica-
tion are already here. A federation of states within a code of
law is not only imaginable but clearly definable. A fellowship
of faiths can be conscientiously designed. Education as a world-
wide partnership of eager minds is theoretically plausible.

When plans for such a federation of the world are so engag-
ing, why do we not proceed at once to put them into effect?
Because the past is so entangled in our emotions and our moral
judgments that we cannot bring free minds to our task. And
our institutions are the skeleton of the past on which we have
to hang the life of the present. They must grow as the bones
of a child grow or our civilization will be crippled and in pain.
They must submit to the disciplines of extension in a day when
social experiences are increasingly inclusive.

In the past men have modified institutional forms either
through compromise or catastrophe. Compromise is evidence
of flexibility. Catastrophe is the breaking point of rigidity.
There is no reason to believe that these alternatives have been
suspended.

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2l8

We are not living in the twilight of civilization. We are at
the end of one of its phases. But that is another way of saying
that we are on the threshold of a new phase. The story of prog-
ress from epoch to epoch has been like the myth of the phoenix 3
society has passed through the fires of war and revolution
periodically, and institutions grown old have been destroyed,
but it has risen from the flames renewed in youth and with
institutions modified to new conditions but still essentially valid
for the unchanging characteristics of human life. We are pass-
ing through the flames. The inevitable workings of change will
refashion our social forms. It is perhaps not too late even now
to do what no generation has ever yet been able to do, to mold
the shape of a new epoch through intelligent compromise rather
than through social catastrophe. It is banal to say that a new era
comes not to destroy the old but to fulfill it; yet this very state-
ment emphasizes the fact that we cannot think of such fulfill-
ment without an echo of destruction sounding in our minds.
The paradox of progress is the paradox of birth: fresh life
emerging from the threatening shadow of death.

IV

When we try to define the place of education in the processes
of experience through which we are passing, we realize that
what we mean, by such a definition is what we are going to do
about the mind. Education is an activity as engineering or man-
ufacturing are activities. It is the application of methods to raw
materials to produce planned results. We believe that certain
types of individuals are desirable and that human beings can
be molded into these types by certain kinds of training, one of
which is the specifically educational, the inculcation of the right
ideas in the right combinations.

The moment we say the “right” ideas, however, we indicate
the predicament of education. People differ about what is
“right.” And a difference about what is “right,” unlike some
other differences, is almost incapable of compromise, for what
is not “right” is “wrong,” and when discussion moves in such
antitheses obstinacy of opinion is called conviction, and that is a

FRANK KINGDON 2ig

fighting word. Education naturally becomes the battleground
of conflicting convictions.

The school occupies an unusually sensitive place in our society.
It is a community enterprise, subject to public control and neces-
sarily responsive to public opinion; this characteristic inevitably
makes all school administrators jealous of public approval, an
attitude that tends toward timidity, an overcautious safeguard-
ing against easily misunderstood experimentation. On its other
side, the school touches the home with unique intimacy: it is
personalized for every parent in terms of what it is doing to
beloved sons and daughters; thus it becomes emotionalized,
and discussion of its work takes on a tone of intensity that no
other public activity has to meet on so general a scale. More-
over, practically everybody has been to school and so feels that
he knows about education; this means that the professional edu-
cator is not conceded the acknowledgment of expertness that is
given to those who work in more mysterious fields — a citizen
who would not think of questioning a treatment prescribed by
a doctor has no hesitation in passing final judgment on school
methods and curricula. Again, every individual or group that
has an idea to propagate or an interest to defend turns to the
school as a convenient tool for its propaganda, so that educators
are being continually bombarded with requests to include this
or that course of training in their programs; on the one hand
voices denounce the schools for neglecting the essentials, and
on the other they condemn them for not including particular
pet nostrums. All this means that every social conflict reports
contentiously in educational institutions. In a day like ours,
when fundamental social adjustments are in the making, edu-
cation is naturally a focus of our bewildering uncertainty.

This reflects itself in the differences among educators. There
are, for example, those who maintain the traditional attitude
that the business of school and college is to teach certain ap-
proved subjects in a factual way, and no more; while there are
others who insist that the school must reproduce in itself the
environment of the society into which the young people will
later enter, and that it has failed if it does not train them in
effective social attitudes. On another front, there are some who

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believe that it is the school’s business to present the local philos-
ophies of government and to ignore all others ; while some
others hold the idea that conflicting political and social theories
of all kinds must be expounded fairly if the school is to keep
faith with expectant minds. There is probably no field where
the experts are indulging in such severe self-examination as in
education. This is a sign of health. It is also an indication, how-
ever, of how energetically our current confusion is registering
in the whole educational enterprise.

Confusion, however, is no adequate ground for inaction. We
are like Athens sending its yearly tribute of young men and
maidens into the labyrinth to lose their way and be devoured
by the Minotaur; nevertheless, like it, we must seek our The-
seus, who, with the thread of Ariadne and his own sword, can
make his way through the maze and slay the monster. Educa-
tion cannot relinquish its obligation to emancipate growing
minds.

However hampered by community pressures and administra-
tive timidity, educators must define and work toward their goal
of liberating human minds and equipping them for new dimen-
sions of experience. They must consciously sharpen the intelli-
gence as an instrument of adjustment. The majority of people
still think of education as a routine for teaching young persons
to read and count. The idea of teaching them to think has an
uneasy suggestion of the subversive about it. Even higher edu-
cation is popularly looked upon as either a vocational advantage
or a pleasant reverie over the provincial and dead cultures of
the past. We hardly dare to talk aloud about an educational
program geared to the machines of modern communication and
planned as a guide to the general mental operations of the
entire world community. We certainly have no international
fellowship of educators devoted to reconditioning the mental
life of mankind to match our cosmopolitan relationships.

The result is that education has fallen victim to the aggres-
sive provincialism of our traditional social groups. Resurgent
German nationalism has seized the universities and turned them
into mechanical sounding boards for state propaganda, overtly
enslaving them, dictating their teaching, emasculating their

FRANK KINGDON

221

originality, and exiling their nonconformists. Not as openly, but
relatively as effectively, politico-economic units elsewhere are
forcing schools and colleges to espouse the status quo. Fright-
ened parochialism in all lands is concentrating on checking edu-
cational experimentation.

Educators — administrators and teachers by their own respec-
tive methods — must resist such pressure. The necessity arises
neither from pride in eccentricity nor any sense of intellectual
superiority, but from the reasonable assurance that the free
mind is a social asset. Society is an expression of intelligent co-
operation. Because it is made up of human beings it is dynamic,
that is to say, it carries the forces of change within itself; one
of its unchanging characteristics is that it is always changing.
The mind recognizes and interprets these changes, and devises
new machineries for new emergencies. If the mind is fettered
by old forms it cannot exercise its inherent elasticity to compass
new needs, and so the whole process of orderly adjustment
breaks down. The only guarantee of adequate rational flexibility
is intellectual freedom controlled by social responsibility.

We have to recognize that such freedom will produce mani-
festations of unsound criticism. Even the best minds have their
aberrations. We cannot help that. The nature of the intellect
is what it is. Whatever its weaknesses, it is the most skillful
equipment for adjustment that we have, and it works most
effectively in an atmosphere of free exchange. Indeed, this is
its safeguard. The play of mind on mind checks and purges
individual eccentricity. No one’s thinking is fully convincing to
another. Therefore the most assured way to average conclu-
sions, which are obviously not always brilliant ones, is through
the free expression of the opinions of all. Inarticulate people
are apt to doubt this because of their almost instinctive distrust
of the articulate, and the articulate are apt to be impatient of it
because of their unwillingness to credit the inarticulate, but in
the end each has his authority and both the pace and content of
decisions are benefited by their interaction.

In a critical period like ours, when all philosophies are being
subjected to searching scrutiny and all institutions tested for
essential stability, it is natural for every impulse to caution

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among us to assert itself. So we have a strong tendency to feel
that we must be careful what we say, and to resent the free
utterance of others to the point where we are ready to agree
that actual restriction must be imposed. Yet it is in precisely
such a time that we need all the light we can get, and the only
way we can get light is through shared thinking. This means
frank utterance, frank criticism, and courageous debate. It is the
method of social wisdom in a decisive hour.

In the light of man’s needs and of unfolding events, we are
justified in declaring that education must mold its forms to
serve four clear ends. It must train minds to think in cosmo-
politan terms that will enable them to see local cultures against
the corrective perspective of world experience and so fit them
for the creative emergence of a comprehensive culture of man-
kind. It must maintain an active international fellowship of free
minds meeting and sharing each other’s research and discoveries
in the assurance that facts and their implications know no bound-
aries of parish or nation or race. It must courageously act upon
its own premise that reason is man’s most expert instrument for
mastering the physical world and organizing his own society,
and when the processes of thought are threatened by the re-
strictive dogmatisms of any political forms it must at any cost
refuse to surrender the independence of the mind. It must rec-
ognize that its full task consists not only in training people in
freedom but also in preparing them for freedom, which means
for control of themselves as well as of their world, and includes
educating them consciously for change and, at the same time,
for responsibility.

George D. Birkhoff

Perkins Professor of Mathematics , Harvard University

INTUITION, REASON, AND FAITH
IN SCIENCE, AND MAN’S
FREEDOM

F ROM the earliest times scientific ideas even when crudely
conceived have been o£ immeasurable importance, not
only for man’s material advancement and control over
nature, but also in modifying and expanding his philosophic
and religious outlook. In the effort to obtain a better under-
standing of his place in the cosmos, he is compelled to proceed
largely by considerations of analogy based upon supposed or
actual fact. And so he turns more and more toward the ever
widening vistas suggested by science in its continual discoveries
of new truth and freedom.

Today the significance of science as a principal source of rev-
elation is almost universally recognized. Thus, on behalf of
Pope Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli (now Pope Pius XII) spoke
before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences concerning the en-
lightenment that comes from “the potent streams of the natural
and rational sciences and the great river of revealed wisdom.”
He said that the former are found “wherever man looks for
and finds truth.” As for “the great river of revealed wisdom,”
is it not to be found in all the absolutely sincere utterances of
poets, philosophers, and prophets, based on the relevant knowl-
edge of their day and made after deepest meditation? It would
seem that such utterances are in essence similar to the pro-
nouncements of the scientist. Is not the vague, prophetic con-
jecture of Pythagoras that nature is mathematical as true as
Newton’s more precise law of gravitation? From this point of

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224

view, the great streams of revelation seem to merge insensibly
into one.

Nevertheless, the immediate effect of scientific advances is
often very disquieting. The strong opposition long shown to
the Darwinian theory of evolution bears witness to this fact.
Similarly at the present day the ever increasing number of un-
co-ordinated theories and mechanical inventions confuses and
chills many of us. Man is felt to be a mere tragic detail in a
vast incomprehensible whole, and our old sense of values seems
to become less and less real.

To persist in such an attitude of discouragement is unjustified.
Every individual has implanted within him the desire to under-
stand his role in the existing order. He feels an inalienable right
to find out his duties and privileges as a citizen of the universe.
By the light of any new knowledge he is always certain to gain
deeper insight into his position. The wise advice of our own
great Emerson comes to mind: “Fear not the new generaliza-
tion. Does the fact look crass and material, threatening to de-
grade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not: it goes to refine and
raise thy theory of matter just as much.”

What, then, are some of the larger points of view in the
pursuit of freedom which are suggested by science today? In
attempting a reply I can of course only offer a personal inter-
pretation, inevitably reflecting the fact that I speak as a mathe-
matician having some acquaintance with physics.

Let us observe in the first place that the universe presents
antipodal aspects — the objective and the subjective, the imper-
sonal and the personal. If we take the objective aspect as more
fundamental we put our emphasis on the notion of reality 3 and
if we start from the subjective, we prefer to speak of knowl-
edge. In either case we are able to discern a kind of nature-
mind spectrum; for there appears a roughly given hierarchy
of five ascending levels — mathematical, physical, biological, psy-
chological, and social. Each level has its appropriate special lan-
guage. The basic corresponding concepts are respectively: num-
ber at the mathematical level; matter at the physical level;
organism at the biological level; mind at the psychological
level; and society at the social level. If we choose to select one

GEORGE D. BIRKHOFF

225

o£ these as somehow more real than the others, a great distor-
tion arises in our point of view. For instance, if we regard the
physical level as the most fundamental, we become material-
ists. But why make such an unnecessary choice? The languages
of the various levels are essentially independent of one another,
and the observed laws are best expressed in their own natural
terms. Why mix up the levels of knowledge unnaturally? Does
it clarify our ideas of social justice and of freedom to try to
explain them in terms of the reactions between protons and elec-
trons in the brain?

These considerations bring us to a first general point of view
towards the levels of knowledge: It is desirable to accord real-
ity in equal measure to all kinds of knowledge everywhere, and
so to view the universe as broadly and impartially as possible.

Another very important observation is that in order to under-
stand the various facts and their interrelations we must always
use abstractions, that is, conceptual tools of a logical or mathe-
matical nature. Contrary to opinions which prevailed until re-
cently, any abstraction serves only limited specific ends. At best
it will enable us to grasp more clearly some small fragment of
reality. For example, by use of the abstraction of Euclidian
geometry, and in that way alone, we understand the nature of
space with a considerable degree of exactitude ; and yet today
scarcely any physicist would ascribe objective reality to space in
itself. It has been Einstein more than anyone else who has
taught the scientific world the true role of Euclidian geometry
by means of his theories of space-time and relativity. More
generally, we have come to realize that our only approach to a
better understanding of the world is by means of a widening
succession of abstract ideas, each explaining imperfectly some
aspect of the stupendous whole. This is a second synthesis de-
serving of especial emphasis.

Thirdly, I would state a fundamental truth about the social
level, which in some sense is the highest level of all: The tran-
scendent importance of love and good will in all human rela-
tionships is shown by their mighty beneficent effect upon the
individual and upon society.

Thus I have begun by presenting very briefly three impor-

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226

tant articles of my personal faith. These are not verifiable ex-
perimentally or strictly demonstrable, so that anyone is free
to agree or to disagree. Against my belief that the levels of
knowledge are to be taken as equally real, one may set for
instance an opposing belief that every fact is ultimately expres-
sible in purely physical terms. If my position is natural for the
mathematician with his abstract point of view, the other may be
preferred by the tough-minded physicist, the biologist with
mechanistic inclinations, and the psychologist with a behavior-
istic outlook. The future will probably show that both of these
beliefs are partly true and partly false.

Similarly, against my conviction that any particular abstrac-
tion is merely a useful tool enabling us to understand certain
facts, some will contend that one particular abstraction will
prove to be final and absolute. Here my attitude springs from
an extensive acquaintance with mathematical abstractions and
their numerous applications, whereas the theoretical physicist,
for example, tends to believe that the ultimate theory of atomic
structure is soon to be obtained.

Likewise some will declare that, much more than love and
good will, it is devoted loyalty to the State which is important ;
and I can imagine that under certain conditions such an asser-
tion might be justified.

It is my especial purpose to show how this phenomenon of
faith arises inevitably in the mind of the scientist ^whenever he
tries to evaluate technical conclusions in his special field. In
doing so I shall discuss the role of intuition, reason, and faith
in science in the pursuit of freedom, first at the mathematical
and physical levels, and then more briefly at the biological,
psychological, and social levels.

By way of definition it must be indicated first what is meant
by intuition. There are certain elementary notions and concepts
which come spontaneously to the minds of all who observe,
experiment with, and reflect on a specified range of phenomena.
Such generally accepted ideas or intuitions constitute the con-
sensus of reaction of intelligent men to a definite part of the
world of fact. John Stuart Mill has said, “The truths known
by intuition are the original premises from which all others

GEORGE D. BIRKHOFF

227

are inferred.” It is in this sense that I shall refer to intuition.
By reason I shall mean the rational superstructures which may
be erected upon the basic intuitive ideas by means of deductive
or inductive reasoning. These superstructures will also be ac-
cepted by all who are able to follow the sequence of logical
steps involved. By faith I shall mean those heuristically valu-
able, more general points of view which are beyond reason, and
sometimes in apparent contradiction with one another, but
which to the individual concerned seem of supreme importance
as he endeavors to give his conclusions the widest possible scope.

It is clear that in this way we obtain a basic classification of
knowledge into three easily distinguishable types. Let us con-
sider the occurrence of these types at the various levels of
knowledge.

By continual crude experimentation with classes of concrete
objects, man has come gradually and inevitably into the posses-
sion of certain numerical ideas. In particular he has been led to
think of the positive integral numbers I, 2, 3 ... as entities
which exist in almost the same sense as the objects themselves.
This concept finds its realization in the designation of the inte-
gers by corresponding marks 1, 2, 3 . . . Such integers are
found to be subject to certain simple arithmetic laws, and these
laws are regarded as intuitively true.

The integers form the basis of a great part of mathematics.
For it is found that with their aid one may construct fractions
and, more generally, real and imaginary numbers. In the course
of the centuries mathematicians have thus built by processes of
pure reason the elaborate structures of algebra, the theory of
numbers and analysis. An extensive array of beautiful and use-
ful theorems has been deduced.

Similarly in geometry — which in its origin may be regarded
as the most elementary branch of physics — we experiment with
rigid material objects and arrive readily at the notions of ideal-
ized small rigid bodies or “points” and of idealized “lines” and
“planes.” Then we observe that certain postulates hold, such
as the familiar ones of Euclid. By means of these postulates,
which embody our intuitions, we are able by deductive reason-
ing to arrive at other geometrical theorems, including such

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results as the celebrated Pythagorean theorem which shows us
in particular that a right triangle with legs of 3 units and 4
units in length has a hypotenuse of exactly 5 units in length.
The vast mathematical domain called “geometry” has arisen
from these elementary geometrical facts as a primary source.

There are many other abstract mathematical structures be-
sides those just alluded to. In all cases it is found that they are
made up of certain accepted intuitions (or postulates) and their
logical consequences.

Now what I desire particularly to point out is that the mathe-
matician goes far beyond such generally accepted clean-cut as-
sumptions and conclusions, in that he holds certain tacit beliefs
and attitudes which scarcely ever find their way into the printed
page. Yet these form none the less part of a considerable oral
tradition. For instance, he believes in the existence of various
infinite classes such as that made up of all the integers. He
believes also that the whole body of strict logical thought called
mathematics is self-consistent: in particular when he finds that
the number ft admits of diverse forms of expression, as, for

exampIe > * = 4 [% - Vs + % - M + . . .]

and a = 2V301 % - % % + % % - . . .)

he feels absolutely certain that if the unending calculations
could be fully carried out, the results would be exactly the same
in all cases. Furthermore, when he recalls that in the past the
most difficult mathematical questions have been ultimately an-
swered, he is inclined to believe with the great German mathe-
matician, Hilbert, that every mathematical fact is provable.
Besides all this, he attributes certain values to his results and
their mathematical demonstrations: some theories seem impor-
tant 5 some proofs are regarded as elegant, others as profound
or original, etc.

Such somewhat vague ideas illustrate what I would call math-
ematical faith. Nearly all the greatest mathematicians have been
led to take points of view falling in this broad category and
have attached the deepest significance to them.

What I wish to emphasize concerning this generally over-

GEORGE D. BIRKHOFF

229

looked aspect of mathematical thought is that, on the one hand,
the beliefs involved have been of the utmost heuristic impor-
tance as instruments of discovery, and, on the other hand, when
examined in detail they generally turn out to involve ideas
which are held true or false, according to the specific definitions
which may be subsequently adopted.

Suppose, for instance, that we turn to the first question, that
of the existence of infinite classes. There was no hesitation about
the unconditional acceptance of such classes until within recent
decades, although there were those, like the ancient Greek
philosopher Zeno and the German algebraist Kronecker, who
profoundly distrusted the use of the infinite in mathematical
reasoning. Today, however, owing primarily to the theory of
transfinite aggregates created by Georg Cantor about fifty years
ago, mathematicians have come to realize that such an infinite
class may exist in the so-called “idealistic” sense but not in the
sense of explicit constructibility. Thus the class of all collections
of positive numbers less than 1 exists in the idealistic sense, but
not in the alternative, more concrete sense.

A similar situation has arisen in the detailed study of the
self-consistency of mathematics. It has appeared that very
limited parts of mathematics can be proved self-consistent. But
such a general assertion as that “the whole of mathematics is
self-consistent” would be considered today not to be sufficiently
precise j and each time that the proof of self-consistency is ex-
tended further, a definite logical price has to be paid in that
certain so-called metamathematical ideas are tacitly employed,
which need themselves to be investigated in the same respect.
For instance, work prior to the Principia Mathematical by Rus-
sell and Whitehead ( 1910) showed that if the notion of class was
not restricted, certain logical paradoxes would inevitably result.
For this reason a theory of the “hierarchy of types” was devised
by them, which limited the notion of class and so avoided the
apparent inconsistencies. We are thus entitled to say either that
mathematics as of the year 1900 was self-consistent or that it
was not, according to the point of view which is adopted. In any
case the belief in question has led us to a much deeper insight
into the nature of logic.

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230

With regard to the unlimited power of mathematical demon-
stration, it has been recently proved by the Austrian mathema-
tician Godel that, if we restrict ourselves to reasoning of an
ordinary type, there exist explicit “undecidable” theorems,
while from a higher metamathematical point of view such a
theorem might be demonstrable. Hence Hilbert’s affirmation is
in one sense false. But despite this fact the open question on
which he focused attention is much better understood than ever
before.

Likewise in the question of value in mathematics, such as the
importance of theories, or the elegance, profundity, and orig-
inality of proofs, it is clear that these obscure ideas depend in
large measure upon the momentary state of the science. Thus
the theory of functions of an imaginary variable and classical
geometry were regarded as extremely important a quarter of a
century ago 5 while today the theory of functions of real vari-
ables and the basic kind of geometry called analysis situs have
respectively displaced these subjects in general mathematical
esteem. It would be hard to explain adequately the reasons for
this change, but the increasing role of discontinuous quantity in
physical theory and the relativistic point of view towards space
and time have certainly been contributing factors.

An excellent instance of the power of individual mathemati-
cal faith in bringing about creative freedom has been afforded
by an American mathematician, the late Eliakim Hastings
Moore. Moore was a thoroughgoing abstractionist who be-
lieved that mathematics itself should be reorganized from a
still higher point of view, by the dissection of essential common
parts out of apparently different abstract fields. And so he was
led to create his General Analysis in 1906. This aimed to em-
body his conviction that “The existence of analogies between
the central features of various theories implies the existence of
a general theory which underlies the particular theories, and
unifies them with respect to these central features.”

As time has elapsed, the deep truth of Moore’s contention
has been amply sustained. Indeed one of the most active schools
of contemporaneous mathematical thought follows the higher
abstract point of view adopted by Moore. But it has been found

GEORGE D. BIRKHOFF

231

necessary to modify Moore’s program, in that, instead of a
single a General Analysis” serving as an omnium-gatherum, it
has been desirable to employ a few typical forms. In this way
his faith in the power of higher abstraction has been largely
and yet not fully justified.

A good many mathematicians are seriously hampered by lack
of the ardent positive faith which Moore showed. This type of
deficiency is generally due to a strong development of purely
critical powers and to overspecialization.

Let us turn next to the physical level, where the correspond-
ing situation is at least equally interesting.

If we accept the ordinary conceptions of space and time,
which seem destined always to play a basic role in workaday
physics, we find that the simplest physical ideas are those which
arise through the manipulation of massive bodies. As these ideas
have become clarified, they have been given abstract formula-
tion in terms of such concepts as those of mass, force, etc. New-
ton’s celebrated three fundamental laws of motion embody the
final form of the refined intuitions thus arrived at. With these
as a basis and the acceptance of certain further special observed
laws, one may deduce by mathematical reasoning the theory
of mechanics as applied, for example, in the solar system.

Similarly, through experimentation with electrified bodies,
electric currents, magnets, etc., there were developed by Fara-
day the intuitive ideas of electric and magnetic lines of force
which are now generally accepted. Later Maxwell incorporated
these ideas in the appropriate electromagnetic equations. Upon
this basis all classical electromagnetic theory has been logically
constructed. Furthermore, by means of the identification of the
light wave and the electromagnetic wave, due to Maxwell, an
adequate theory of light has been obtained.

Thus we see the important role which intuition and reason
have played in two fundamental branches of physics— me-
chanics and electromagnetism. A cursory survey of the various
other branches of the subject would show that a similar situa-
tion holds throughout, except in the rapid developments of
quantum mechanics during the last decade or so. In this strange
theory the physicist begins indeed with a planetary model of

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the atom, reminiscent of Niels Bohr’s earlier theory. But a fly-
ing leap is made from this temporary scaffolding to what is
thenceforth regarded as the only basic reality — the wave equa-
tions of Schrodinger and, better still, of Dirac. Once having
arrived at these mathematical equations the physical theorist
proceeds to show how he can predict innumerable facts previ-
ously out of his range by use of this arbitrary ad hoc machinery.
The process involved somehow reminds me of a record sea
voyage made through a fog! I cannot but anticipate that a more
intuitive and natural approach to essentially the same results
will be found later on. An analogous earlier instance in physics
is perhaps to be found in the unmotivated theory of cycles and
epicycles entertained by the ancient astronomers. This explained
the motions of the heavenly bodies with considerable success,
but was destined to be completely displaced by the intuitively
reasonable, gravitational theory of Newton.

The fact remains, however, that the recent development of
quantum mechanics forms one of the most astounding and im-
portant chapters of all theoretical physics.

It is interesting to recall how this great advance came about
through the faith of the German physicist Planck at the outset
of the present century. His direct experience with the phe-
nomena of radiation had led him to believe that there were
discontinuous processes at work, not to be explained by any
modification of the timeworn classical theories, and so he was
led to formulate his celebrated quantum hypothesis in 1900.
It was this daring concept of Planck, more than anything else,
that has freed the minds of physicists from the shackles of too
conventional thinking about atomic phenomena, and so has
made possible the quantum-mechanical quest of which the end
is not yet in sight.

There has always been an abundance of faith among the
physicists. Everyone knows how Newton and others have found
confirmation even for their religious beliefs in the lawful char-
acter of physical phenomena. It is not hard to understand why
the tendency towards dogmatic affirmation among the physicists
has been stronger than among the mathematicians. For the
physicist with considerable justice feels that he is exploring the

GEORGE D, BIRKHOFF

233

mysteries of the only actual and very exciting universe ; whereas
the mathematician often appears to live in a purely mental
world of his own artificial construction, A good illustration of
this tendency of the physicists is afforded by their changing
attitudes towards the wave theory versus the corpuscular theory
of light. Over a considerable period the corpuscular theory of
Newton held sway ; then this was displaced by the wave theory
of Huyghens, the Dutch physicist ; and nowadays a kind of
vague, uncertain union of the two is generally accepted.

In this connection it is especially interesting to recall the sci-
entific beliefs to which Faraday was led in his fundamental
work on electricity and magnetism. From his experimental re-
sults in this field, he saw that there was obeyed here as else-
where the law which he called the “conservation of force” and
which we today would call the “conservation of energy.” He
saw that this energy was localized in space, and he could only
conceive of it as being propagated in time 5 and so he was led
to the belief that electromagnetic energy is also propagated with
finite velocity. Thus in an article, “On the Conservation of
Force,” published in 1857, h e expressed himself as follows:
“The progress of the strict science of modern times has tended
more and more to produce the conviction that ‘force [energy]
can neither be created nor destroyed 5 . . . ;” “time is grow-
ing up daily into importance as an element in the exercise of
force; to inquire, therefore, whether power acting either at
sensible or insensible distances, always acts in time is not to be
metaphysical.” By way of justification of the rather mathemati-
cal direction in these thoughts, Faraday said further, “I do not
perceive that a mathematical mind, simply as such, has any
advantage over an equally acute mind not mathematical . . . ;”
“it could not of itself discover dynamical electricity nor electro-
magnetism nor even magneto-electricity, nor even suggest
them.” But the achievements of the more mathematical Max-
well were later to show that Faraday had underestimated the
power of pure reason.

It is thus clear that through an act of faith Faraday attained
to a kind of deeper insight; for the existence of the electro-
magnetic wave has long since been established experimentally.

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However, the beliefs of Faraday in this connection cannot be
regarded as absolutely true, since according to present-day con-
ceptions the notion of energy which he accepted is only roughly
valid as a statistical approximation. Nevertheless, Faraday cer-
tainly penetrated more into the nature of electrical and mag-
netic phenomena than any of his contemporaries 5 and it is dif-
ficult to see how, with the limited mathematical and physical
knowledge at his disposal, he could have gone any further in
the way of prophetic conjecture.

The intimate relation between philosophical-scientific points
of view and actual advances in theoretical physics has been ad-
mirably illustrated by Einstein’s gravitational theory of 1915.
Taking as his starting point the bold but reasonable hypotheses
that matter must condition space and time, and that, in parts
of space remote from matter, elementary particles move with
uniform velocity in a straight line, he arrived at his field equa-
tions as the most elegant mathematical embodiment of these
ideas. Thus there was obtained a quasi-geometrical theory of
gravitation which in certain respects is more natural than the
celebrated theory of Newton, while the predicted differences,
although excessively minute, are in favor of the new theory.
But Einstein’s theory cannot be regarded as true in any absolute
sense, since it gives us at best a partial, highly idealized view
of the physical universe.

It is hardly too much to say that, since the beginning of the
present century, the main advances in theoretical physics have
been the outcome of a similar kind of mathematical guesswork,
in which, however, the mathematician himself has taken little
or no part! The guessing of the physical theorist is guided al-
most entirely by considerations of subtle mathematical analogy.

This peculiar situation has led naturally enough to the feel-
ing that pure mathematics almost suffices without much recourse
to the results obtained in the physical laboratory. Sir Arthur
Eddington has embodied the extreme point of view in his recent
book, The Relativity Theory of Protons and Electrons , thus
taking a position antipodal to that of Faraday. Eddington says:
“Unless the structure of the nucleus has a surprise in store for
us, the conclusion seems plain — there is nothing in the whole

GEORGE D. BIRKHOFF

2 35

system of laws of physics that cannot be deduced unambigu-
ously from epistemological considerations. An intelligence, un-
acquainted with our universe but acquainted with the system of
thought by which the human mind interprets to itself the con-
tent of its sensory experience, should be able to attain all the
knowledge of physics that we have attained by experiment. . . .
For example, he would infer the existence and properties of
radium, but not the dimensions of the earth.”

I would comment upon this mystical conjecture of Edding-
ton as follows. It is no doubt partially true that in some respects
we need the laboratory less than we did before, owing to the
fact that we live surrounded by all manner of scientific instru-
ments and machines, with whose properties we have become
acquainted. In other words, we live in a transformed world
which is a kind of huge laboratory. Yet I doubt whether any
individual, however intelligent, who was not acquainted with
such instruments and machines would be able, through analysis
of ordinary sensory experience, to go very far. On the other
hand, I should agree with Eddington that the starting point
from which known physical laws may be deduced is likely to
depend on only a few intuitive ideas ; and perhaps a sufficiently
powerful mathematical intelligence would realize that the facts
of sensory experience could only be simply explained in this
way.

Although I have no especial acquaintance with the biological,
psychological, or social domains, it seems clear to me that a
similar situation prevails in them. In the biological field the
intuitions upon which one depends are those associated with the
concept of the organism and its evolution. These intuitions can-
not be formulated conclusively and completely in simple postu-
lates, as is possible at the mathematical and physical levels. It
is rather through an acquaintance with an immense array of
interrelated, analogous facts that the biologist finds himself able
to deal with novel situations. By means of the geological record
on the one hand and the results obtained in the field and labora-
tory on the other, he acquires a better and better understanding.
His principal weapon, with some exceptions, is always inductive
reasoning.

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It is interesting to remark that the insufficiency of a rigor-
ously deterministic theory of the living organism admits of
almost mathematical demonstration in the following manner. A
genuinely mechanistic universe would have to be free of any
infinite factors. For example, if one accepts a simple Newtonian
theory, there might be reaching the earth from infinite space
unknown quantities of matter and energy, so as to change arbi-
trarily the course of events upon the earth. But in any com-
pletely mechanistic system, free of such infinite factors, it is not
difficult to prove that there will necessarily be a kind of eternal
Nietzschean recurrence, which is highly improbable.

Recent advances in the chemical knowledge of large organic
molecules seem to indicate an innate hospitality of actual matter
toward the evolution of the living organism. In this way a
plausible genetic account of the origin of life is suggested,
which, however, can scarcely be called mechanistic. It begins to
seem possible that we are on the verge of further refinements
in our concept of matter, such as Emerson anticipated in the
quotation made above.

The situation at the psychological level is even less amenable
to precise treatment. All of us have a lifelong experience with
ourselves and other human beings. This automatically gives
rise to a vast complex of intuitive psychological notions. We all
are aware of course that there are concomitant physiological
processes going on in the body, nervous system, and brain. Now
it is the business of the professional psychologist to give exact
definition and interpretation to these crude ideas 5 and he finds
his greatest illumination in the facts of abnormal psychology,
with which most of us are unacquainted. However, in the case
of either layma n or professional the processes of reasoning are
mainly by analogy. Even the psychiatrist, familiar with many
concrete cases, must treat each new patient by the inductive
method. There are too many psychological intuitions and too
few exact laws for any imposing edifice of pure reason to be
erected.

In certain restricted psychological domains, formalization is
to some extent possible. Thus I have ventured to formulate a
theory of “esthetic measure,” by explicit numeration and

GEORGE D. BIRKHOFF

237

weighting of esthetic factors. This aims to explain certain sim-
ple esthetic facts in our enjoyment of visual and auditory forms.
The theory has been to some extent substantiated by experi-
ments made at Harvard and elsewhere. But in any case, no
matter how successful the theory might prove, it would be
wholly absurd to try to set up an elaborate logical structure on
the basis of the fairly arbitrary and inexact assumptions in-
volved. Generally speaking, as we proceed from the more ob-
jective to the more subjective levels of thought, we find that
elaborate logical structures seem to be of less and less utility.

The basic belief of the professional psychologist is in the
completeness of the physiological accompaniment of every psy-
chical fact; and he formalizes the observed facts by means of
the parallelism. But there is a conflict between the attitude
towards mind of the technician, for whom the individual is a
complex of neurally characterized components, and that of the
ordinary man — equally an expert though of a different kind —
who sees all sorts of permanent values in personality, not ade-
quately characterized in neural terms. The second attitude leads
nearly all of us to have deep affections and abiding personal
loyalties, whether or not we are psychologists !

Here again I think that these apparently opposing points of
view are both more or less true; and I incline all the more to
this opinion because of my conviction that as yet we know
relatively little about the phenomena of personality. For it
seems certain to me that the extent of hidden organization in
our universe is infinite, outside as well as inside of space and
time. Such a conviction is very natural to a mathematician, since
the three ordinary spatial dimensions and the single temporal
dimension are for him only particular instances of infinitely
many other conceivable dimensions! If this be true, any broad
conclusions concerning the nature of personality would seem
altogether premature.

At the social level the most serviceable intuitive ideas cluster
around the concept of societal evolution. It is of course the
comparative study of human institutions which furnishes the
principal interest. The analogy between forms of society and
evolving organisms is a deep-lying one. Here again the useful

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238

logical structure which can be built around the very complicated
facts is exceedingly simple. Even in such a formalized field as
ethics, dealing with the behavior of the individual as a member
of society, logic plays an almost negligible role.

Belief here seems to gather principally around the idea of
societal progress. Progress — or its nonexistence — serves as our
fundamental tenet. Some believe that society can improve in-
definitely, tending toward a perfect society. Such a belief is of
course a fundamental one in most religious systems. Others find
this idea too naive. They stress the gregarious instinct in man
and tend to think of societal changes as taking place in various
directions strongly conditioned by changing physical environ-
ment. All would admit, however, that without the concept of
dynamical social processes, social theorizing would be stale and
unprofitable.

Let us turn now to consider some further conclusions, towards
which this brief survey of intuition, reason, and faith in freedom
at the various levels seems to point.

As far as intuition and reason are concerned, these are the
common property of all competent individuals. The narrow,
closely articulated chains of deductive reasoning serviceable at
the earlier levels are more and more replaced by loose webs of
inductive reasoning at the later levels, as we pass from the
objective to the subjective. At the same time the basic intuitions
change from the simple and precise types employed in mathe-
matics and physics to the increasingly complicated and diverse
forms characteristic of biological, psychological, and social phe-
nomena.

However, it is just as necessary to clarify and to formalize
our knowledge at these later levels as at the earlier ones. The
processes of systematic reasoning, whether inductive or deduc-
tive, have always a definite prophylactic value, and in particular
enable us to avoid the dangers of prejudiced and intolerant
points of view. It may be observed in passing that the careful
application of impartial thoroughgoing analysis is as important
for everyday living as it is in the study and the laboratory.

The striving for rational comprehension is one of the noblest
attributes of man. In his agelong difficult struggle he has been

GEORGE D. BIRKHOFF

239

able to secure greater freedom only through a better technical
mastery of his environment. No other method of liberation has
been vouchsafed to him. But this increased mastery has brought
with it automatically new intellectual responsibilities and a
more complex way of life. In consequence, unforeseen and
threatening dangers arise from time to time; and there is thus
imposed on him the necessity to advance still further, which is
today more urgent than ever before.

A new injunction has been laid upon the spirit of man, to
know and to understand ever more broadly and deeply, in
order to achieve freedom.

Now along with the increase in scientific knowledge there
appear certain crudely expressed, deeper insights, not com-
pletely true or false, some in opposition to others, but all su-
premely valuable nevertheless. These are embodied in beliefs
w r hich seem the inevitable accompaniment of all creative
thought.

Thus in the daring effort of the scientist to extend knowledge
as far as possible, there arises an aura of faith. It is this spon-
taneous faith and the desire for freedom which furnish the most
powerful incentives and are the best guides to further progress . 1

When the preceding philosophical perspective was nearing
completion, the word “freedom” seemed to ring in my ears
more than once. It was obvious that the scientific outlook which
I had formulated bore directly on this subject — a subject never
so important for humanity as it is today.

The invitation to contribute to these essays has given me an
unexpected and welcome opportunity to present my own beliefs,
as a scientist, on this important problem. In fact it seemed to
me a personal duty to accept; for, in the present violently di-
vided state of world opinion concerning political freedom, any
clarification of this idea will surely diminish differences in “ideo-
logical” points of view and so increase mutual understanding.

In trying to aid in this task, I would begin with a very clear
and strong affirmation that the concept of freedom, however
vague and elusive, is absolutely indispensable in the character-

1 See my Presidential Address before the A. A. A. S. 3 Science , Dec. 30, 1938.

FREEDOM

240

ization of social relations. Defoe’s hero, Robinson Crusoe, ship-
wrecked alone on a desert island, was certainly a free man.
With the coming of his man, Friday, whom he had saved from
death, there was a society of two on the island, one a free man
and the other his slave ; and this distinction was a very impor-
tant one for them both. Crusoe regarded Friday with affection,
and tried to enlighten and instruct his untutored mind; while
Friday was devoted, body and soul, to his master. This touch-
ing (if fictional) relationship between the two men in the sim-
plest possible type of society illustrates not only the importance
of the concept of freedom but also its complexity.

Similarly there can be no question that in any actual modern
society the condition of freedom or servitude of its members is
one of the most fundamental aspects to be considered. In 1923 2
when I first tried to bring out the general philosophical signifi-
cance of the five “levels of thought” described above, it proved
illuminating to name four fundamental concepts at each level.
Those which I selected at the social level were: personality,
freedom, value, and ideal. Let us glance for a moment tenta-
tively at these concepts and their interrelation before trying to
approach that of freedom in more detail.

As has been stated, “personality” is the most fundamental
concept at the highest, that is, the social, level, being its very
essence just as abstraction, matter, organism, and mind are the
corresponding essential elements at the lower, the mathemati-
cal, physical, biological, and psychological levels respectively.
Every civilized human being would admit that personality at
its noblest and finest is the most marvelous thing of all. It
would also be generally conceded that human personality is
capable of extraordinary further development. For these rea-
sons it would seem obvious that men should never be treated
with cruelty or unmerited indignity; and that those who do
mistreat others thereby degrade themselves.

Evidently the degree of “freedom” in any society is somehow
measured by the lack of undesirable constraint imposed upon its

2 See my Lowell Institute and Los Angeles Lectures: The Origin , Nature ,
and Influence of Relativity , New York, 1925J in particular, see the final
lecture.

GEORGE D. BIRKHOFF

241

members. However, this rough attempt at qualitative definition
involves a serious pitfall. For how shall that which is undesir-
able be determined when the idea of the undesirable hinges
in turn upon the accepted, antecedent ideology? Because of this
difficulty we can only conclude for the moment that, if we could
once agree upon what was undesirable constraint for the indi-
vidual, this type of definition might be of service. In that case
the individual in a free society might well be compared to a
microorganism in a favorable culture medium.

The idea of “value” is also one of fundamental importance.
From our births we are conditioned by means of family life,
mother tongue, prevailing social customs, physical environment,
and our general social heritage. These external factors in their
aggregate produce a social environment in which we develop
and by which we are specifically fashioned into units of person-
ality. In the process we become aware of many social values.
For example, Western music — an extraordinary achievement of
Western civilization as a whole — has acquainted many of us
with musical values. There are numerous other esthetic, intel-
lectual, and spiritual values known to us all; and there is a
kind of parallelism on a grand scale in the development of such
values in every civilization. Witness for instance the diverse
forms of Eastern music, each with its unique features. A broad
understanding of the nature and scope of such values forms an
essential ingredient of any liberal education.

The quest for the “ideal” may be described as the attempt to
discover new and deeper values. If we are not somehow en-
gaged in the pursuit of the ideal, our personalities are inactive
and incomplete. As was emphasized above, it is always some
form of faith which spurs us onwards in this search for the ideal.

Let us now turn to a closer examination of the concept of
political freedom. I shall begin by making the basic claim that
the ordinary man, chastened and disciplined by sorrow and all
the hard facts of life, as well as the leaders of cultivated
thought who try to understand the hidden significance of things,
are everywhere of the same mental and moral constitution to
an astonishing extent. To sustain this claim I will state three
facts gathered directly from my own knowledge.

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242

Firstly, to the uttermost depths of profundity and the finest
shades of distinction, the mathematical ideas of mankind are
everywhere the same. It is true that the mathematical achieve-
ments of the West are much more considerable in recent cen-
turies than those of the East, with almost all European nations
participating. But India has produced within recent decades the
mathematical genius Ramanujan 5 the Japanese have been build-
ing up a substantial tradition in mathematics more rapidly than
we Americans did in the comparable period 5 and I have known
Chinese, Indian, and Japanese students of such high ability as
to leave no doubt whatever in my mind that China, Japan, and
India are destined to contribute strikingly to world develop-
ment in this domain of thought. The latent mathematical talent
is there in abundance. All that is needed to bring this about is
that the material conditions of life and educational opportunities
improve. Furthermore, since modern scientific thought depends
upon the mathematical ideas of order and quantity, I am forced
to the conclusion that these great nations of the East are similar
in capacity for scientific thought to those of the West, with the
presumption of a comparable future development. All the evi-
dence based on their actual accomplishments in various scientific
fields confirms unmistakably this conclusion.

But the similarity lies even deeper. In talking with educated
men from all over the globe I have always found the deepest
and most sensitive appreciation of other cultures than their own.
For instance, I recall various conversations with friends of the
nations just mentioned in the East, and with British, French,
German, Italian, and Russian friends in the West, all showing
a thorough understanding of our New England cultural tradi-
tion and its values. In other words, men of different races and
nations, conditioned by diverse social climates, are readily capa-
ble of sympathetic understanding of the varied culture of men
everywhere. Thus, not only in the sphere of rational thought
but equally in the wider realms of esthetic and spiritual appre-
ciation, men of totally different background are strikingly simi-
lar in mind and spirit. This is a second noteworthy fact.

Thirdly — and this appears to me very significant — I have yet
to meet an individual respected by his fellows whose ideas of

GEORGE D. BIRKHOFF 243

right and wrong, in concrete instances on which he was free to
speak, were not very like my own. In this connection I recall
interesting conversations with two admirable and patriotic per-
sons belonging to great nondemocratic powers situated almost
at the antipodes. I had ventured in each case to express a fear
lest certain specific territorial aggressions might be made by
their nations. On both occasions the suggestion was received
politely but with the implication that it was a groundless sus-
picion on my part (although, as it turned out, quite the con-
trary was true). What interested me most, however, was their
tacit agreement with my own judgment that such acts would
not be justifiable. Indeed I have generally found a basis for
sympathetic mutual understanding, even on controversial ques-
tions, except in those rare cases where I was dealing with per-
sons whose personal position obviously affected the objectivity
of their judgment, I might add that bitterness and hopelessness
as well as selfish motives have exactly the same kind of preju-
dicial effect in our own country as elsewhere!

If this claim of the essential sameness of human beings every-
where be admitted, it becomes possible to improve our earlier
tentative definition of political freedom as follows: the degree
of such freedom in a society is measured by the lack of con-
straint which is obnoxious to the typical individuals composing
the society. That is to say, we are now able to interpret our
former phrase “undesirable constraint” as meaning constraint
which the large majority tend to regard as objectionable.

Now, in every state, governmental power must be intrusted
to a ruling group. It is through the decisions of this group that
constraints are imposed. There is no inherent necessity that the
selected constraints be beneficial or acceptable to the society at
large, any more than there is a necessity in a great industrial
corporation that the policies enforced by its directors be bene-
ficial or acceptable to the workers or even to the shareholders.
In fact the reverse seems frequently to be true in both cases!

As long as the ruling class is chosen by general ballot and
changes from time to time, the government is bound more or
less to typify its individuals, and there is certain to be a good
deal of freedom in the State. But when this power has some-

FREEDOM

244

how come into the hands of a small, ruthless group, careless of
human opinion, then political freedom is lost and widespread
unhappiness of spirit sets in. When this stage has been reached
the body politic is to be regarded as definitely “sick.”

Now without question there is a good deal of this malady
today in some of the greatest nations of the world. Until re-
cently, however, it seemed that, through a policy of “appease-
ment” and the natural operation of beneficent forces, recovery
would gradually set in. But it is apparent today that, unless
there is close watchfulness on the part of the other nations, the
malady is likely to spread over all of mankind. A world
stricken in this manner would be intolerable to most intelligent
human beings.

. What is especially cherished by the so-called democratic na-
tions is freedom of speech. We deem it essential that all of us
may freely make remarks, whether judicious or not, about those
in authority and about political questions, without fear of pun-
ishment. Nevertheless this privilege is not absolutely essential
for a considerable degree of freedom. There may be nations
where the internal turmoil of spirit has been so violent that
unlimited freedom of political expression would soon lead to
acts dangerous to the well-being of all. In such a situation a
limited restraint of speech might not be generally obnoxious,
just because the necessity for it would be understood. Unfortu-
nately such restriction often becomes more and more exacting,
until at last attempts are made to suppress even “dangerous
thoughts.”

The scientific approach as well as common sense suggests cer-
tain general conclusions whose wider acceptance would tend to
restore the peace and freedom which are vital for the well-being
and progress of mankind. Those which I would stress follow
directly from the principles which were first set forth.

It has become absolutely necessary to cultivate the broad and
deep objective study of man and society in order to understand
more fully the very difficult problems which threaten us, and
to discover the best methods for solving them.

Ideologies — whether democratic or not — are to be thought of
as specific attempts to hit off broad social realities by a formula ;

GEORGE D. BIRKHOFF 245

and yet, like all abstract formulas, these are strictly limited in
their capacity to express the illimitable truth.

Love and good will are fundamentally important for the
constructive development of the possibilities of men; and love
and good will always connote peace and freedom.

In this way of thought we attain to a profound faith in the
unrealized potentialities of the human race and to the under-
standing necessary to aid constructively in their realization.
Having this attitude of spirit and mind, we will certainly op-
pose to the uttermost any coercion of the individual tending to
destroy his freedom!

3. FREEDOM IN THE BODY POLITIC

Bertrand Russell

William James Lecturer 3 Harvard University

FREEDOM AND GOVERNMENT

I OGXCALLY, freedom and government might seem to be
antitheses, since compulsion is of the essence of govern-
~Ji ment. Anarchists, of whom Kropotkin is the intellectu-
ally most respectable, have, on this ground, advocated a com-
plete absence of government. They have believed that such
collective decisions as are necessary can be adopted unanimously,
without any need of powers of coercion vested in a majority or
aristocracy or monarch. But history is not encouraging to this
view. The two most important examples of its embodiment in
a constitution — the kingdom of Poland and the League of Na-
tions — both came to a bad end. Anarchism, however attractive,
is rejected as a method of regulating the internal affairs of a
State except by a few idealistic dreamers. Per contra, except by
a few idealistic dreamers it is accepted as the only method of
regulating international affairs. The same mentality that insists
most strongly on the necessity of subjecting the individual to
the State insists simultaneously on the complete independence
of the sovereign State from all external control. Logically, such
a view is untenable. If anarchy is bad nationally, it is bad inter-
nationallyj if it is good internationally, it must be good nation-
ally. For my part, I cannot believe it to be good in either
sphere.

Belief in freedom, as a practical force in politics, arose out
of two main sources, religion and trade. Religious minorities,
wherever they had little chance of becoming majorities, turned

249

FREEDOM

250

against persecution; and traders objected to the curtailment of
their profits by grants of monopolies to courtiers. *Ihe liberal
philosophy that arose from these two motives was, at first, very
moderate and restrained. The degree of liberty demanded by
such men as Locke and Montesquieu is much less than exists in
modern democratic states. Thus Montesquieu, quoting Cicero,
says: “Liberty is the right of doing whatever the laws permit,
and if a citizen could do what they forbid he would be no
longer possessed of liberty, because all his fellow-citizens would
be possessed of the same power.” This may seem an inadequate
degree of liberty, if it is not supplemented by some principle
as to what the laws are to permit. In France, after the Revoca-
tion of the Edict of Nantes, the exercise of the Protestant reli-
gion was illegal; it cannot therefore be said that the right to do
what the laws permitted conferred any effective liberty upon
French Protestants.

Nevertheless, the right to do whatever the laws permit is a
very important part of liberty. It was secured in England by
habeas corpus, which was a barrier to kingly tyranny; it did not
exist in France under the ancien regime . In our own day, Jews
in Germany, kulaks in -Russia, and nationalists in India, have
been punished by the executive without appeal to the law courts,
and therefore without proof of criminality. This sort of thing
is forbidden in the American Constitution by the provision
about “due process of law.” Montesquieu’s intention is to main-
tain that a man should be punished only by the law courts, and
that the law courts should be independent of the executive.
The American Constitution, whether deliberately or by inad-
vertence, has made the law courts also to some extent inde-
pendent of the legislature, and in this respect has gone beyond
what Montesquieu advocated in the passage quoted above. In
other passages, however, he gave a wider and more constructive
definition of liberty, for instance: “the political liberty of the
subject is a tranquillity of mind arising from the opinion each
person has of his safety. In order to have this liberty, it is requi-
site the government be so constituted as one man need not be
afraid of another.” This definition of political liberty could not
be improved upon, and I shall accept it in what follows.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

251

Political liberty, however, is only one species of a genus, and
there is no reason to regard it as more desirable than other
species of liberty. Political action may promote or restrict other
kinds of liberty as well as the political kind 3 we cannot there-
fore judge of political action solely with reference to political
freedom, even if we consider freedom the sole proper end of
politics.

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of ob-
stacles to the realization of desires. Complete freedom is thus
only possible for omnipotence; practicable freedom is a matter
of degree, dependent both upon external circumstances and
upon the nature of our desires. Stoicism and all kindred philos-
ophies seek to secure freedom by the control of desires and by
confining them to what the individual will can secure. Political
theorists, on the contrary, for the most part concentrate on the
external conditions of freedom. This may be a source of error
if the subjective part of the problem is forgotten. If all the
men guilty of crimes of violence were transported to an island
and left to form a self-governing community, they would need
a much more stringent form of government than is required
where men are temperamentally law-abiding. Nevertheless, so
long as we remember that we are making an abstraction, it is
convenient and harmless to treat the objective part of the prob-
lem of freedom in isolation.

We may give the name “physical freedom” to the mastery
over nonhuman obstacles to the realization of our desires. Mod-
ern scientific technique has increased physical freedom, but has
necessitated new limitations of social freedom. To take an illus-
tration that involves no controversial issues, motor traffic has
unavoidably brought about a very much stricter control over
the roads by the police than was formerly necessary. Speaking
generally, the technical changes that have occurred in the world
during the last hundred years have increased the effects, both
intended and unintended, that one man’s acts are likely to have
upon another man’s welfare. Montesquieu’s “tranquillity of
mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety”
would be by no means promoted by the removal of traffic regu-
lations, and therefore no one protests against them in the name

FREEDOM

252

of liberty. But in other kinds of activity — of which the most
important is war — although the same principle is applicable,
various interests and passions prevent men from applying it,
and lead them still to defend a degree of anarchy which may
have promoted total freedom in a former age, but now has the
opposite effect.

Many of the most vehement advocates of freedom have been
led to more or less anarchic conclusions, because their conception
of freedom was aristocratic rather than democratic. Byron’s
Corsairs and Giaours are free to practice murder and pillage
and to allow their broken hearts to inspire a hatred of the hu-
man race, but their freedom is of a sort that cannot be general-
ized, since it is based upon terror. Tacitus can look back with
nostalgia to the good old days of the Republic, when Roman
aristocrats were free to plunder provinces with impunity. Amer-
ican plutocrats can demand, in the name of freedom, the right
to obstruct organization among the men whose labor produces
their wealth, while demanding the fullest freedom of organiza-
tion for themselves. Educational reformers, who endeavor to
introduce freedom into schools, require much vigilance to avoid
unintentionally establishing a tyranny of muscle, under which
all but the biggest children are trembling slaves. One of the
strongest impulses of energetic individuals is the impulse to
control and subject those who are unable to resist them, and if
this impulse is left free the result is a great diminution of the
total liberty of the community. When freedom is conceived
democratically, the control of the impulse to tyranny is seen
to be the essential and most difficult problem. The freedom of
prominent individuals must be curtailed if any freedom is to
be secured for the mass of mankind.

The promotion of physical freedom may, even in the most
freedom-loving communities, in some degree override the desire
for political freedom. Take, for example, the construction of
roads. Even if everybody wants them, everybody would prefer
the expense to be borne by someone else. The only device for
distributing the burden fairly is taxation, and a man cannot be
allowed to escape taxation by professing an indifference to roads.
Yet his objection might be genuine: the philosopher Lao-tse

BERTRAND RUSSELL

2 53

held that roads corrupt primitive innocence, and there is no
reason why he should not have modern disciples. If, however,
a conscience clause were introduced to meet their case, it is to be
feared that the number of Lao-tse’s disciples would increase
with inconvenient rapidity when the financial advantages of the
antiroad creed became evident. In a democracy, just as much
as in a tyranny, taxes have to be paid by those who object to
the purposes for which they are collected. It is only by a mysti-
cal identification of the majority with the community that de-
mocracy can be held to involve liberty. It is a means to liberty
if the majority are lovers of liberty $ if not, not.

Eighteenth-century advocates of liberty thought always of
isolated individuals rather than of organizations 5 many of them,
like Rousseau, were even actively hostile to freedom of organ-
ization. In the modern world it is organizations that raise the
difficult problems. Legislators have to consider two questions:
for what purposes may organizations be formed? And what
may they legally do in pursuance of their purposes? These
questions have been fought out in connection with trade unions,
which at first were everywhere illegal, then were permitted to
exist provided they did nothing to further their objects, then,
very gradually, were permitted first one activity and then an-
other. At every stage the legal mind viewed the process with
grave suspicion, and was only forced to yield by the pressure
of democratic opinion. In the case of trade unions, most of those
who were most in favor of freedom advocated the removal of
legal restrictions, in spite of the fact that these restrictions were
defended in the name of freedom by employers who wished to
retain their monopoly of economic power. Nevertheless, it has
always been clear that the power of trade unions might become
a genuine menace to freedom.

The rise of fascism brought about, in its early stages, an
exactly opposite situation. Here it was the reactionaries who
favored freedom of organization and the progressives who
opposed it. The first step in a fascist movement is the combina-
tion under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess
more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity.
The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent,

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by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the
other. This technique is as old as the hills 3 it was practiced in
almost every Greek city, and the moderns have only enlarged
its scale. But what I am concerned with is the reaction of mod-
ern liberal sentiment to this new attack on liberty. Does the
principle of free speech require us to put no obstacle in the way
of those who advocate its suppression? Does the principle of
toleration require us to tolerate those who advocate intolerance?
Public opinion, among those who dislike fascism, is divided on
these questions, and has not arrived at any clear theory from
which consistent answers could be derived.

There is of course one obvious limitation upon the principle
of free speech : if an act is illegal, it is logical to make it illegal
to advocate it. This principle justifies the authorities in prohibit-
ing incitement to assassination or violent revolution. But in
practice this principle does not by any means cover the ground.
If there is to be any personal liberty, men must be free to urge
a change in the laws. Suppose a man makes a speech in favor of
communism, with the implication that it is to be brought about
by the ordinary processes of democracy, and suppose that, after
his speech, a questioner asks whether he really believes that
such changes can be secured without violent revolution. Unless
he gives an affirmative answer with far more emphasis than the
facts warrant, he will have, in effect, promoted revolutionary
sentiment. Or suppose a fascist makes an anti-Semitic speech,
urging that Jews should be subject to legal disabilities 5 his ar-
guments must be such as to stimulate hatred of the Jews, and
the more successful they are the more likely they are to cause
violence. Imagine Mark Antony indicted for his speech in
Julius Caesar: although it is obviously intended to cause vio-
lence, it would hardly be possible to obtain legal proof of this
intention. To prohibit the advocacy of illegalities is therefore
not enough; some further limitation upon the principle of free
speech is necessary if incitement to violence is to be effectively
prevented.

The solution of this problem has two sides: on the one hand,
the ordinary citizen, if he is on the whole content with his form
of government, has a right to prohibit any organized attempt

BERTRAND RUSSELL 2 55

to overthrow it by force and any propaganda obviously likely
to promote such an attempt. But on the other hand the govern-
ment must avoid such flagrant injustice or oppression as is likely
to lead to violence in spite of prohibition. The Irish secured
their liberties by assassination 5 women in England won the
vote by a long series of inconvenient crimes. Such tactics ought
not to have been necessary, since in each case the professed
democratic principles of the government justified the aims of
the rebels, and therefore seemed to excuse their methods. But
when, as in the case of the fascists, the aims of the rebels are
fundamentally opposed to a governmental theory accepted by
the majority, and when, further, it is obvious that violence is
intended to be used at a suitable moment, there is every justifi-
cation for preventing the growth of organized power in the
hands of a rebellious minority. For if this is not done, internal
peace is jeopardized, and the kind of community that most men
desire can no longer be preserved. Liberal principles will not
survive of themselves ; like all other principles, they require
vigorous assertion when they are challenged.

Freedom of opinion is closely connected with free speech,
but has a wider scope. The Inquisition made a point of investi-
gating, by means of torture, the secret opinions that men en-
deavored to keep to themselves. When men confessed to un-
orthodox opinions, they were punished even if it could not be
proved that they had ever before given utterance to them. This
practice has been revived in the dictatorial countries, Germany,
Italy, and Russia. The reason, in each case, is that the govern-
ment feels itself unstable. One of the most important conditions
of freedom, in the matter of opinion as in other matters, is gov-
ernmental security. In England, during the sixty or seventy
years preceding the Great War, freedom of speech and opinion,
in political matters, was almost complete, because everyone
knew that no subversive opinion had a chance of success. Gilbert
and Sullivan made fun of the army and navy, but the only
penalty was the Queen’s refusal to bestow a knighthood on Gil-
bert. Nowadays, they would be shot in Russia, beheaded in Ger-
many, sent to a penal settlement in Italy, accused of violating
the Official Secrets Act in England, and investigated by a Sena-

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torial Committee in the United States on suspicion of being in
receipt of Moscow gold. The change is due to increased inse-
curity, which is caused by war, the fear of war, and the impov-
erishment due to war. And modern war is mainly due to na-
tionalism. Until this state of affairs is changed, it is hardly to
be hoped that there will be as much freedom of opinion as
existed in Western countries fifty years ago.

Freedom of opinion is important for many reasons, especially
because it is a necessary condition of all progress, intellectual,
moral, political, and social. Where it does not exist, the status
quo becomes stereotyped, and all originality, even the most
necessary, is discouraged. Since freedom of opinion can only
exist when the government thinks itself secure, it is important
that the government should have the approval of the great
majority of the population and should deal with discontented
minorities, wherever possible, in a manner calculated to allay
their discontent. A government must possess force, but cannot
be a satisfactory government unless force is seldom necessary.
All the kinds of freedom advocated by liberals disappear when
security disappears, and security depends upon a wide diffusion
of contentment. This in turn is impossible when the general
level of prosperity is falling. Liberalism flourished in the nine-
teenth century because of economic progress ; it is in eclipse now
because of economic retrogression.

There can be no widespread liberty except under the reign
of law, for when men are lawless only the strongest are free,
and they only until they are overcome by someone still stronger.
The tyrant in a lawless community is like the King of the
Wood, “who slays the slayer and must himself be slain.” Who-
ever, in the name of liberty, impairs respect for the law, incurs
a grave responsibility; yet, since the law is often oppressive and
incapable of being amended legally, revolution must be allowed
to be sometimes necessary. The solution of this problem is not
possible in abstract terms. It was solved practically in the Amer-
ican Revolution; but most revolutions have so weakened the
respect for law that they have led to dictatorships. Perhaps a
revolution can be completely successful only when those who
make it are persuaded that they are defending legality against

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257

some illegal usurpation. But this requires a rare combination
of fortunate circumstances, and is not possible in the case of
revolutions that attempt any far-reaching change in the social
structure.

The most fallacious of all the applications of the principle
of liberty has been in international affairs. While it has been
generally realized that liberty for the individual depends upon
law, it has been thought that liberty for nations depended upon
the absence of law. This is partly a historical accident, connected
with the years that followed the Congress of Vienna. At that
time a number of reactionary states, most of which were purely
dynastic, established what was in effect an international govern-
ment of Europe, and devoted their united strength to the sup-
pression of every form of liberalism in every part of the Con-
tinent. The opposition to despotic monarchs was bound up, at
that time, with the principle of nationality; democracy went
hand in hand with the desire to make the boundaries of states
coincide with national sentiment instead of being determined by
the accidents of royal marriages or diplomatic bargains among
the victors over Napoleon. It was thought that, when once na-
tional boundaries and parliamentary institutions had been estab-
lished everywhere, the democracies would co-operate freely,
and the causes of war would have been eliminated. In this mood
of optimism, liberals completely overlooked the need for any
international authority to regulate the relations between states.

But nationalism triumphant has proved, is proving, and will
prove, incompatible not only with liberty, but with everything
else that intelligent men have considered desirable since the
Renaissance. To consider, for a moment, goods other than free-
dom, especially the eighteenth-century ideals of culture, educa-
tion, and humanitarian enlightenment: in these matters South-
eastern Europe and Latin America have lost much of what they
owed to the Hapsburgs; Ireland, from nationalist sentiment,
has cut itself off from European culture by Catholic education
and censorship; India, from similar motives, is preparing to
repudiate everything occidental. I have met Mexican national-
ists who wished to obliterate everything that their country had
acquired since 1492. The conception of the unity of civilization,

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born in the Roman Empire, nurtured by the medieval Church,
brought to maturity by the Renaissance and modern science,
survives now only, and that precariously, in the Western de-
mocracies, where, it is to be feared, it will perish during this
war. Elsewhere, in the name of some national hero, living or
dead, the State devotes its powers to the inculcation of some
national theology as crass and stupid as the superstitions of
South Sea Islanders or the cannibalistic rites of the Aztecs.

If stupidity were the only defect of the modern national re-
ligions, the philosopher might shrug his shoulders and remark
that the bulk of mankind have always been fools. Unfortu-
nately, while the superstitions of savages are harmful only to
themselves, those of nations equipped with scientific technique
are dangerous to the whole world and, in particular, involve a
grave loss of liberty, not only among the devout, but also
among those who wish to remain rational. Vast expenditure on
armaments, compulsory military service, and occasional wars are
part of the price that has to be paid by those nations that will
not accept foreign domination. The inevitable outcome of the
doctrine that each nation should have unrestricted sovereignty
is to compel the citizens of each nation to engage in irksome
activities and to incur sacrifices, often of life itself, in order to
thwart the designs of other nations. Hitler, in a sense, had al-
ready subjugated England and France, since a large part of the
thoughts and actions of Englishmen and Frenchmen were de-
termined by reference to him; and Hitler himself is a product
of the previous subjugation of Germany by England and France.
In a world of international anarchy individual freedom is as
impossible as in a country where private violence is not re-
strained by the law and the police.

A complete international government, with legislative, execu-
tive, and judiciary, and a monopoly of armed force, is the most
essential condition of individual liberty in a technically scientific
world. Not, of course, that it will secure complete liberty ; that,
I repeat, is only possible for omnipotence, and there cannot be
two omnipotent individuals in the world. The man whose de-
sire for liberty is wholly self-centered is therefore driven, if
he feels strong enough, to seek world dictatorship ; but the man

BERTRAND RUSSELL 2$g

whose desire for liberty is social, or who feels too weak to secure
more than his fair share, will seek to maximize liberty by means
of law and government, and will oppose anarchic power in all
its various forms.

Every man desires freedom for his own impulses, but men’s
impulses conflict, and therefore not all can be satisfied. There
are two kinds of conflict between men’s desires. In the first
place, we desire more than our fair share of possessions ; this
can be met, in theory, by decreeing equality of distribution, as
has been done by the institution of monogamy. But there is a
more essential and deep-rooted conflict owing to the love of
power: most human beings, though in very varying degrees,
desire to control not only their own lives but also the lives of
others. Most forms of control over the lives of others diminish
the freedom of those who are controlled, but some increase it.
The man who endows a university has power over the lives
of those who profit by his benefaction, but his power is such
as to liberate their own impulses. Inventors have great power,
and the general tendency of inventions is to increase physical
liberty. It is therefore possible for power impulses to find an
outlet not incompatible with social freedom. To insure that they
shall do so is a problem partly of individual psychology, partly
of education, and partly of opportunity. A homicidal maniac
cannot be allowed any freedom for his power impulses, but
their undesirable character may be the result of bad education
and lack of opportunity. Cromwell spent the first half of his
career in agitation connected with draining the Fens, and the
second in making himself a military dictator; in other circum-
stances, his power impulses might have found only the earlier
beneficent outlet. If freedom is to be secure, it is essential both
that useful careers shall be open to energetic men, and that
harmful careers shall be closed to them. It is important also
that education should develop useful forms of technical skill,
and that the circumstances of childhood and youth should not
be such as to generate ferocity. All these conditions are absent in
totalitarian countries, where the principal means to success are
sycophancy, treachery, and brutality, and where education is

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designed to produce a combination of submissiveness and trucu-
lence.

If freedom were the sole political desideratum, there would
still, as we have seen, be need of law and government, which,
in the international sphere, remain to be created. But individual
freedom, however desirable, is only one among the ends of
statesmanship. Among innocuous activities we admire some
more than others: we praise a great poet, composer, or man of
science more than we praise men who are innocent but undis-
tinguished. Education, both general and technical, is generally
conceded to be desirable, even at the cost of the liberties of
both parents and children. And if we knew a way to produce
a community of Shakespeares, Beethovens, and Newtons, we
should probably think it worth while to do so. Freedom is too
negative a conception to determine the ends of human life, or
even of politics. Nevertheless, it is only in so far as the majority
of men agree that other ends can be pursued in political action
without arousing resistances and violences that are likely to
prove disastrous. An unpopular Utopia, in so far as a benevolent
dictator could realize it, would prove to be quite different from
his dreams. Liberty, therefore, must always remain a sine qua
non of other political goods.

The transition from individual to social ethics is theoretically
far from simple. Most philosophers who have written on ethics
have been mainly concerned with the individual. When they
have been concerned also with society, they have failed to build
a bridge from the individual to the community that will bear
logical scrutiny. Take, for instance, the two foundations of
BenthanPs social philosophy: (1) every man pursues his own
happiness j (2) every man ought to pursue the general happi-
ness. Perhaps if we could submit Bentham to a viva voce exam-
ination, he would expand his second proposition as follows:
The general happiness will be increased if every man acts in a
manner likely to increase it 5 therefore, if I am in a governmen-
tal position, or in any way owe my own happiness to the fact
that I represent the general interest, I shall endeavor to cause
others to act in a way that will promote the happiness of man-
kind, which I can only do by means of institutions that cause

BERTRAND RUSSELL z6l

the interests of the individual and those of the community to
be identical. This explanation might pass muster in an ideal
democracy, where no politician or official could continue to en-
joy his salary unless he served the public faithfully. But it does
not give any reason why, where an ideal democracy does not
exist, any public man should aim at the public good. I dare say
Caligula and Nero got more fun out of life than Marcus Au-
relius did. One wonders what arguments Bentham would have
used to them, and how long he would have been allowed to go
on using them. The only argument compatible with his psy-
chology would have been that they would come to a bad end,
but they might have replied that they preferred a cheerful
beginning and a bad end to drabness throughout. Bentham
imagines the legislator to be in some unexplained way an incar-
nation of the public interest. But this is only because, in fantasy,
he is the legislator, and he is in fact a benevolent man. Psycho-
analysts show most people that they have unconscious vices, but
in Bentham’s case it was the virtues that were unconscious. In
obedience to theory, he conceived of himself as wholly selfish
and remained unaware of his spontaneous desire for the general
happiness. Public spirit, he says (in the Table of the Springs of
Action), is an absurd motive, which never actuated anyone; in
fact, it is a synonym for spite. Nevertheless, he hopes to find a
legislator who will seek the public good. He was young in the
era of benevolent despots, which perhaps accounts for his failure
of logic. However that may be, his individual psychology and
his social ethics remain disparate and fundamentally inconsistent.

Of the great religions, Christianity and Buddhism, in their
primitive and most vital forms, are concerned only with per-
sonal virtue, and show no interest in social and political ques-
tions. On the other hand, Confucianism is fundamentally politi-
cal, and considers all virtues in relation to the welfare of the
State. The result is a certain dullness and aridity, which caused
it to be supplemented by Buddhism and Taoism among the
more spiritually minded Chinese. Confucianism is a religion for
the civil service, and gave rise to the most remarkable civil
service the world has ever known. But it had nothing to offer

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262

to prophets or poets or mystics: St. Francis or Dante or Pascal
would have found it wholly irrelevant to their needs.

Karl Marx, as a religious leader, is analogous to both Con-
fucius and Bentham. His ethical doctrine, in a nutshell, is this:
that every man pursues the economic interest of his class, and
therefore, if there is only one class, every man will pursue the
general interest. This doctrine has failed to work out in prac-
tice as its adherents expected, both because men do not in fact
pursue the interest of their class, and because no civilized com-
munity is possible in which there is only one class, since govern-
ment and executive officials are unavoidable.

There is one method of making the public good fundamental
in ethics which has been favored by many philosophers and
some politicians, namely, to endow the community with a mysti-
cal oneness and to regard the separate citizens as unreal ab-
stractions. This view may be supported by the analogy of the
human body. No man is troubled by the possibility of conflict
between the different parts of his body, say the great toe and
the little finger. The body has to be considered as a whole, and
the interests concerned are those of the whole, not of the sev-
eral members. A healthy body is a completely integrated cor-
porative State, governed despotically by the brain. There are,
no doubt, possibilities of rebellion, such as paralysis and St.
Vitus’s dance, but these are diseases which are exceptional.
Could not the body politic be similarly integrated and similarly
devoted, instinctively and harmoniously, to the welfare of the
whole? The answer is merely an appeal to the facts. An indi-
vidual body contains only one mind, whereas the body politic
contains many, and there is no psychological mechanism by
which many minds can co-operate in the same manner in which
muscles controlled by a single mind co-operate. Co-operation
among many minds has to be a matter of agreement, even when
it is agreement to be dominated by a dictator. A further, but
less fundamental, argument against those who regard a human
society as an organism is that they almost invariably take a
nation, rather than mankind, as the organism concerned, thus
merely substituting the strife of nations for that of individuals,

BERTRAND RUSSELL 263

instead of arriving at a genuine public interest which is to be
served by the whole human race.

Considered practically, not philosophically, the question is:
Can the public interest ever be a force in public affairs, or must
politics be always and essentially nothing but a tug of war
between the passions of powerful individuals or groups? There
are two ways in which the public interest can become practically
operative: first, through the impulse of benevolence, as in
Benthamj second, through the consciousness of the common
man that he is too weak to stand alone, and that he can only
secure that part of his political desires which he shares with
other common, men. An uncommon man can hope to become a
dictator, but a common man can hope, at best, only to become
a voter in a democracy. Common men are helpless without a
leader, and as a rule follow a leader who deceives them; but
there have been occasions when they have accepted the leader-
ship of men inspired by benevolence. When this has happened,
the public good has become an effective force in public affairs.
To secure that it shall happen as often as possible is the practi-
cal problem for the man whose theorizing on politics is guided
by a desire for the welfare of mankind.

The practical solution of this problem is difficult in the ex-
treme, but the theoretical solution is obvious. Common men
throughout the world should be made aware of the identity of
their interests, wherever it exists 5 conflicts of interest which are
apparent but not real must be shown to be illusory 5 real con-
flicts of interest, where they exist, must be removed by a change
of institutions, of which the most harmful are national sover-
eignty and private ownership of land and raw materials ; edu-
cation and economic circumstances must be made such as not to
generate hatred and ferocity and a desire for revenge upon the
world. When all this has been achieved, co-operation will be-
come possible with a minimum of coercion, and individual free-
dom will be increased as well as all other political desiderata.

To sum up: Government is a necessary but not sufficient con-
dition for the greatest realizable degree of individual liberty 3
indeed, there is need of more government than at present, not
less, since an international authority is as much required as the

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present national states. But if government is not to be tyranni-
cal, it must be democratic, and the democracy must feel that
the common interests of mankind are more important than the
conflicting interests of separate groups. To realize this state of
affairs completely would be scarcely possible, but since the prob-
lem is quantitative a gradual approach may be hoped for. At
present the world is moving away from all that is valued by
lovers of freedom, but this movement will not last forever.
The world has oscillated many times between freedom and
slavery, and the dark times in which we live are probably no
more permanent than the progressive epoch that rejoiced our
grandfathers.

Ralph Barton Perry

Professor of Philosophy > Harvard University

LIBERTY IN A DEMOCRATIC
STATE

M isunderstandings commonly arise from the

fact that for reasons of linguistic economy a single
word is used to carry many meanings. Where, as in
the case of “liberty,” the word itself is charged with emotional
meaning, the effect is to ally parties who really mean different
things, or divide parties who really mean the same thing. To
clarify such a situation, the first step is to set down the several
meanings side by side in order that libertarians may realize
precisely what it is that they propose and antilibertarians pre-
cisely what it is that they oppose.

There are at least seven meanings of liberty which are rele-
vant to democracy. There is positive versus negative liberty 5
and there is primitive versus moral liberty. These are all fun-
damental meanings, prior to government. The introduction of
government generates the three additional meanings: legal lib-
erty, or liberty under government $ civil liberty, or liberty
against government 5 and political liberty, or liberty for govern-
ment.

One does not speak of liberty at all unless there is a disposi-
tion to perform an act. Given such a disposition, negative liberty
implies an external obstacle, as when the child is held in the
grasp of an adult, or when some barrier, such as iron bars, is
interposed between the prisoner and the place where he would
prefer to be. With such an obstacle in mind, negative liberty

26s

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266

means merely its absence or removal. In social relations the
obstacle commonly takes the form of a threat — what the indi-
vidual desires to do is penalized, that is, connected by natural
causation or human intervention with a strongly repugnant
sequel.

Negative liberty is relative to the specific character of a felt
interest, and to its intensity. In an age of religious zeal nega-
tive liberty will mean liberty from an oppressive Church; when
men aspire to the management of their own affairs, they will
covet liberty from a tyrannical State; when they are ambitious
to rise in the economic scale, negative liberty will mean escape
from the limitations imposed by the existing industrial hier-
archy. To writers, liberty means relief from censorship; to
drinkers, repeal of prohibition; to pacifists, the absence of com-
pulsory military service; to agitators and minorities, unrestricted
speech and assembly. Negative liberty plays a small role in the
lives of apathetic men; and will take a high place in the code
of men whose desires and ambitions are strong, and who feel
the impact of the obstacle with a proportional intensity.

Positive liberty, on the other hand, means that the externally
unimpeded interest is capable of proceeding towards its realiza-
tion. A man is not positively at liberty to walk unless he has
sound limbs, or to travel unless he has the fare — even though
nothing prevents him, and nobody forbids him. Liberty from
prison bars is not positively enjoyed except by an individual
who is capable of moving his body; the absence of censorship,
persecution, or tyranny implies no positive liberty except to
those who possess the resources for artistic creation, for wor-
ship, or for self-government.

Liberty, positive and negative, is effective personal choice.
No one can be said to be an advocate of full liberty, nor can
any State or policy be said to promote it, unless liberty is thus
doubly conceived, as both unhampered and implemented.

When liberty is claimed or conceded as a right, there arises
a distinction between primitive and moral liberty. Primitive
liberty is the claim of any interest to the positive and nega-
tive conditions of its realization. This liberty manifests itself

RALPH BARTON PERRY 267

on every plane, from the most elemental or selfish appetite
to the most spiritual or humane aspiration. It possesses no
moral quality in itself, but creates an obligation on the part of
other interests. According to democratic theory, every interest
is, so far as it goes, an original source of value: to negate it is
to do evil, and therefore subtracts something from the sum of
goods 5 to negate it unconsciously, is to be reprehensibly selfish j
to negate it willfully, is to be malicious. Its own self-assertion
may therefore properly be attended with a consciousness of
rectitude j and the disinterested observer will feel a moral sym-
pathy with the victim.

But liberty is not only good in the material sense, as pos-
sessing a claim to moral consideration, but may itself possess
the form of moral goodness intrinsically. When it does pos-
sess this form, whether personal or social, it may be termed
“moral liberty.”

Moral liberty in the personal sense is liberty internally reg-
ulated by reason and conscience. It appears upon that level of
integration in which the individuals several appetites have
been centered and unified by a reflective will. It is a part of
the purpose of the democratic State that individuals should
be allowed and encouraged to exercise the prerogatives of per-
sonality.

In the second or social sense, liberty is moralized when it
assumes the form of a sentiment which moves the individual
to approve and to seek the enjoyment of liberty by all. Love
of liberty in this sense is tested by the attitude towards an-
other^ liberty. The love of one’s own liberty creates a needful
corrective of oppression, but it is morally defective, because it
lacks the intent to provide for the interests of others. Patrick
Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” is thus ambigu-
ous. If he meant that he preferred death to the loss of his own
liberty, he did not rise above the level of personal self-interest.
But if he meant that he preferred death to the destruction of
a social system under which all persons enjoyed their just
rights, then his sentiment was “noble,” but it would have found
a fitter expression in the words, “Give us liberty, or give me
death.”

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Moral liberty, in the social sense, is also possessed by what
may be called “cultural liberty,” meaning the “disinterested”
activities of science and of art. Truth serves all interests, since
all interests embrace judgments concerning their instruments
or objects and are effective in proportion as these judgments
are true. The use of truth by one interest is compatible with
its use by others. In so far as science is successful it results in
a fund of truth freely available to all, and its value is there-
fore social or human, rather than private and selfish. Beauty
is a sharable good. The enjoyment of painting, sculpture,
poetry, and music does not bring individuals into a relation
of rivalry and does not create or exacerbate enmities, but in-
duces a sense of participation and is enhanced thereby.

The liberties on which attention is focused at the present
time are those whose meaning is related to government. The
first is liberty under government, to which I propose to give
the name of legal liberty.

The widely diffused idea that liberty is created by the State
is both false and confusing. It is entirely conceivable that an
isolated individual possessing suitable faculties and facilities,
or an individual living in an unorganized society of individuals
whose interests were happily compatible with his own, should
possess and enjoy full liberty, negative and positive, primitive
and moral. This reservation being made, it is now in order to
affirm that no high degree of liberty is normally possible with-
out the protection of the State.

The most serious hindrance to a man’s interest is the rival
interest of his neighbor, and the remedy lies in the systematic
delimitation of interests. There is a greater liberty to be en-
joyed through the acceptance of such delimitation than through
the claim of limitlessness, because the limited liberties are guar-
anteed and regularized. In short, while the State neither cre-
ates nor justifies liberty, it does create security 3 and it is upon
security that the fuller and more constructive liberties of civ-
ilization depend.

The restrictions which government imposes are justified
only by the primitive and moral liberties for which they make

RALPH BARTON PERRY 269

room — as much room as possible. Any given system of legal
liberty may fail to provide the maximum of room, and this
failure furnishes the ground for criticism and reform. This
priority of primitive and moral liberties is not eagerly accepted
by those who under the existing system enjoy the most spacious
room, and would therefore prefer to invest their present legal
liberties with an ultimate validity.

If it be the duty of government to promote the liberty of
every man, this function must be extended to embrace posi-
tive and not merely negative liberty. The most ancient, per-
sistent, and oppressive enemies of liberty are not external hin-
drances, whether physical or human, but poverty and ignorance.
It is the chief fault of prosperous and of enlightened men that
they forget this fact. What government does in the way of
education, public information, health, housing, increased wages,
reduced hours of labor, or the redistribution of wealth may be
as much a service of liberty as is its protection of men against
interference, from one another or from itself. The distinction
between “welfare” and liberty breaks down altogether, since
a man’s effective liberty is proportional to his resources.

The topic of civil liberty is the most confused, and, next
after that of war, the most prominent of contemporary issues.
The phrase has at least five distinct meanings which are, un-
happily, not distinguished. It is sometimes used to mean legal
liberty, in the sense already discussed above. It is sometimes
used to mean political liberty, in the sense to be discussed
below. It is sometimes used, without definition, to refer to an
indeterminate list of specific liberties: the liberties of speech,
press, assembly, and religion, as interpreted in judicial deci-
sions; the so-called “inalienable” rights of life, liberty, and
property or happiness; the rights of petition, habeas corpus,
“due process” of law, trial by jury, and the inviolability of
the home or person; together with other rights embraced
under the broad formulas of “common law rights,” or “the
rights of Englishmen.” It is sometimes used, again without
definition, to refer to a narrower group of the liberties listed
above, namely, those liberties which have to do most directly

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with the effective public utterance of opinion. Finally, civil
liberty is sometimes taken to mean such liberties as the above,
when conceived as limiting the powers of the executive and
legislative branches of the government, or of the government
“in power, 7 ’ and as entrusted to some more considered pro-
cedure, such as the framing or amendment of the constitution,
or decisions by courts having a constitutional jurisdiction.

The expression “civil liberty 77 will here be employed in the
fifth of these senses, in the sense, namely, of constitutional
liberty. Civil liberty defines the line between the use and the
abuse of the powers of government. It has meaning only in
a political philosophy, such as democracy, in which it is affirmed
that government, instead of being an end in itself, possesses
obligations beyond itself. It signifies what, to use Jefferson’s
expression, “the people are entitled to against every govern-
ment on earth.”

The principle of civil liberty implies a tendency of govern-
ment to defeat its legitimate end and become an abuse rather
than a utility. There are three ways in which government may
become the enemy of liberty: by disloyalty, by excess, and by
inefficiency.

By disloyalty of government is here meant any deviation
from its public function due to the private self-interest of the
ruler. It signifies the chronic evil, and the chronic suspicion,
associated with the name of tyranny. The popularity of gov-
ernment does not suffice to save it from tyranny, but may create
new forms of tyranny. Thus popular government lends itself
to the tyranny of the majority or of the masses ; and to the
tyranny of the demagogue, who conceals his self-interest by
flattering the people, and appeals to their baser instincts
against their reflective judgment. The corrective of tyranny
in these popular forms does not lie in relating government
more closely to the existing will of those who live under it, but
in a scrupulous regard for the liberty of minorities or dissent-
ing individuals, and in a system of popular education that shall
emancipate the critical faculties and develop a resistance to irra-
tional appeal.

Liberty may be conceived as a just claim not only against

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271

disloyal government, or tyranny, but also against excessive
government, or paternalism. A popular government is pecul-
iarly liable to this abuse. It tends to be trusted by those who
live under it, since it speaks in their name; and it tends to be
invoked by them as a utility, since they feel it is their creature.

The issue of liberty versus excessive government derives its
present meaning to most Americans from the application to
“business.” The beginning of sound thinking on this matter
is to see that the economic system known as laissez-faire capi-
talism is not an effect of “the silence of the law,” but is founded
on legal rights. Men who are merely let alone to do as they
please do not compete with one another, they plunder one
another. “Free competition” depends no more on letting men
do as they please, than on preventing them from doing as they
please, and forcing them to do as they do not please. The only
question regarding government’s interference with business is
whether it shall interfere more or less, and in old ways or new
ways. The only democratic principle applicable to this ques-
tion is the principle that the restraints imposed by government
shall be justified by their positive fruitfulness to the individuals
living under government. Judged by this standard, govern-
ment is always excessive when it is exercised for its own sake.

Civil rights protect men, in the third place, from the ineffi-
ciency of government, that is, from the malfunctioning of its
mechanisms and agencies. Considering the instruments at its
command, government will sometimes most effectively serve
liberty by leaving the regulation of private interests to pri-
vate institutions, such as church, school, or charitable organi-
zation, or to the unofficial power of the social conscience. Thus
the agencies which will effectively regulate opinion, sentiment,
science, and art are coarse instruments, unsuited to so delicate
an operation. If a hammer and saw were the only tools of sur-
gery, it would be difficult to remove the diseased portions of
the body without injuring the adjoining parts. Similarly, the
mechanisms of public enforcement are ill suited to distinguish
between art and pornography, or between science and dogma,
or between persuasion and propaganda, or between education
and indoctrination.

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272

Every instrument may be dulled or broken by overuse. A
State which is asked to do too much may do nothing well. Its
functions may increase more rapidly than its competence. It
is prudent, therefore, to limit the functions of the State out
of regard for the human limitations of its rulers.

The inefficiency of government may consist not in the im-
perfection of its own instruments, but in its failure to profit by
other instruments. It is self-evident that the State should de-
rive the utmost public benefit from the motive of private self-
interest. There is an area within which public and private inter-
est coincide, and here the motive of private interest may be
stronger and more reliable than the disinterestedness of govern-
ment, and its use more economical.

Civil liberty sets limits to the government in power, and its
rationale lies in the fact that the government in power tends,
unless restrained, to tyranny, paternalism, and inefficiency.
There are certain liberties which are justified not as a protec-
tion of the individual against government, but as indispensable
to the functioning of government. Any civil liberty when so
justified becomes a “political” liberty. It is not easy to circum-
scribe the liberties which should be here included. There is
no doubt, however, regarding those liberties which enable the
individual to form judgments for himself, and communicate
them to his fellow-men. Among these liberties are the liberties
of speech, of press, of assembly, and of religion, when these are
conceived as essential to the processes of political democracy.
So-called “academic freedom,” embracing the liberties of re-
search and of teaching, may be considered as an application of
the same principle, as may liberties of radio or cinema, or any
other form of communication which advancing technology may
devise.

The meaning of these political liberties depends on the as-
sumption that a distinction can be made between judgment and
practice. The liberty to judge that property should be held in
common does not imply a liberty to practice communism; the
liberty to hold the theory of free trade does not imply the
liberty to bring goods across the frontier without paying the

RALPH BARTON PERRY 273

duty. Given any act whatsoever there is a distinction between
a favorable opinion or sentiment towards acts of that type, and
the performance of that act. A similar distinction holds also
between persuasion and incitement. The line is difficult to draw,
but in principle it is clear that the liberty to convert others to
a judgment which if acted upon would be lawless does not
imply the liberty to perform or induce a lawless act.

A democratic polity is pledged to the principles of enlight-
enment and consent) and the political liberties are corollaries
of these principles. In a State otherwise conceived, as founded
on dogma or power, the political liberties have no place.

First, democracy puts its trust in the achievement and dis-
semination of knowledge. But knowledge can be achieved only
by minds which are freed from coercion in order that they may
be faithful to evidence. Knowledge is a potential achievement
of every inquiring mind. The maximum advance of true knowl-
edge depends on giving to every mind a commission to explore
the facts and exercise its reasoning capacities. The essential
political liberty is thus liberty of thought, but the liberties of
speech, press, assembly, and teaching are also conducive to
the achievement of knowledge, through begetting criticism,
confirmation, and discussion.

Every liberty is limited by its justifying principle. Those
who claim liberty of judgment and communication for the sake
of enlightenment submit themselves to that standard. The lib-
erty of dogmatic affirmation, or of impassioned utterance, or of
artfully propagating error, or of silencing opponents, or of per-
sonal polemics, cannot be justified as conducive to the achieve-
ment and spread of knowledge. Such liberties may be claimed,
and perhaps rightly granted, on other grounds ; but every
thinker, speaker, writer, or teacher who claims liberty in order
that he may contribute to knowledge is thereby pledged to in-
tellectual sobriety, disinterestedness, and good faith.

Second, the liberties of judgment and communication are
essential to the constitution of the democratic State as condi-
tions of that consent from which government derives its just
authority. The fundamental principle of political democracy is
not the agreement of the people with the government, but the

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274

agreement of the government with the people. If this is to
occur there must be an antecedent and independent agreement
among the people themselves.

Here again the justifying principle imposes limits on lib-
erty. If liberty is to be claimed on the ground of consent, then
its exercise must conduce to consent, in the sense of agreement
of government with a popular choice freely and independently
formed. This argues that the government must refrain from
dictating the decision from which it derives its mandate. It
must not only avoid interference, but must positively assist the
people to choose for themselves. But consent also implies a
thoughtful decision, that is, an act of deliberate choice from
among the relevant alternatives. He who defends the liberty
of judgment and communication on the ground of consent can-
not claim a right to use this liberty merely for purposes of
intimidation, emotional excitation, or hypnotic suggestion.

Political liberty may be exercised in relation to the govern-
ment in power; or in relation to the political constitution, taken
as embracing the principle of political liberty itself. The first
of these uses of political liberty is its partisan use, and the sec-
ond its revolutionary use.

It is evident that if the existing government is to rest on
consent, its policies must have been, and must continue to be,
debatable pro and con. The recognized device by which gov-
ernment by consent is obtained is through the party system,
by which a single party or block of parties assumes the powers
of government for a limited time. It is an essential feature of
this procedure that the election should be preceded by a free
discussion of issues and candidates, and the government elected
is supposed to conform its policies to the judgment which has
prevailed. Consent is periodically renewed or withdrawn by
the same processes as those by which it is originally given. Thus
the party in power, at the same time that it frames statutes
and performs administrative acts in accordance with the popular
mandate from which it derived its authority, must also respect
the political liberties of its opponents, which may be used for
its own defeat. Every party will have two loyalties, to itself
and to the broad purpose of the system at large.

RALPH BARTON PERRY 275

But what if a faction arises within a democracy, claiming
the partisan liberties guaranteed by democracy, but pledged,
in the event of securing power, to destroy democracy? While
this issue has been forced to the front by the rise of communism
and fascism, it has always been latent, and constitutes the cen-
tral paradox of political democracies. They seem obliged to
harbor and nourish their own enemies, and thus to foster the
seeds of their own destruction.

The revolutionary form of political liberties is defensible by
the principles of enlightenment and consent. It is essential to
a democratic polity that not only its specific policies, but its
fundamental creed, its premises spoken and unspoken, should
be affirmed by those who live under it. The sort of agreement
which democracy contemplates is that agreement, founded on
objective evidence, which emerges only after the critical facul-
ties have been matured and emancipated, and which can en-
dure the test of criticism. It is impossible to appeal to evidence
for democracy, without admitting evidence against democracy.
The possibility of truth is conditioned by the hazard of error.

So far the partisan and revolutionary forms of political lib-
erty are similar. We now reach the point at which they diverge.
Partisan liberty is argued from the requirements of a certain
type of polity, and whether the opposition to government suc-
ceeds or fails, the effect is to reaffirm that form of polity. As
regards revolutionary liberty, on the other hand, the logic of
the situation is entirely different. If such an opposition suc-
ceeds, liberty will have been used to destroy and render impos-
sible for an indefinite period to come the very form of polity
which was the premise of its justification.

It is impossible to discuss the question whether government
should or should not grant a liberty, unless one formulates and
adheres to some end. If the proponents of democracy con-
ceive this end as government based on the reflective consent of
the governed, then to argue that the government should in
any given situation so conduct itself, by commission or omis-
sion, as to defeat this end is self-contradictory. In the dilemma
with which the State is here confronted this contradiction seems

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276

unavoidable: whether the State denies political liberty in order
to preserve political liberty, or concedes political liberty know-
ing that it will be used to destroy political liberty.

The contradiction is, however, avoidable when the end is
conceived as the creation and preservation of a political sys-
tem, the means as a present act or policy of government. Thus
if a present denial of liberty is conducive to the creation and
preservation of the aforesaid system, there is no contradiction
in the employment of such a means: there is, on the contrary,
a positive obligation to employ such a means.

The confusion of thought which attends this subject arises
from a failure to define the libertarian end. There is a scrupu-
lous or abstinent libertarianism, which acts on the maxim,
“Never restrain liberty” 5 and there is an experimental and
constructive libertarianism, which seeks to establish a durable
polity in which liberty is embodied in institutions: and as
standards or norms the two are different. Up to a certain point
their requirements are consistent. But the adherent of democ-
racy who has adopted the institutional libertarian end as his
supreme principle must be prepared in case of conflict to sub-
ordinate his libertarian scruples.

In deciding whether the revolutionary use of political lib-
erty will or will not result in the destruction of libertarian insti-
tutions, many considerations must be taken into account. Recent
developments in the technique of propaganda and force make
it more difficult than ever before in the world’s history to over-
throw a dictatorship. The likelihood that democratic institu-
tions once destroyed could be re-created is correspondingly
small. A democracy which is in power should not lightly sur-
render this advantage. On the other hand, it is difficult to deny
political liberties to a revolutionary party without weakening
devotion to the ultimate end of libertarian institutions. The
means tend to corrupt the purity of the end. The agencies re-
quired for the effective repression of political liberties in par-
ticular cases are likely to extend their application, and to do
more evil than good. These and many other like considerations
make the decision difficult. But the first step, and a long step,

RALPH BARTON PERRY 277

toward solving the problem is a clear definition of the standard
of judgment. Those who believe that the end of preserving
and perfecting democratic institutions is the supremely valid
standard for organized society must adopt the necessary means
undeterred by any mere taboo.

Robert M. Maclver

Professor of Political Philosophy and Sociology ,
Columbia University

THE MEANING OF LIBERTY
AND ITS PERVERSIONS

W HEN we contemplate the mass of utterances de-
voted to the subject of liberty we find it hard to
escape the conclusion that of all the arts the most
backward is the art of thinking. I am referring not to any pro-
found or highly technical art but to an intrinsically simple one.
I do not mean the art of fathoming the secrets of nature or
the art of calculation or the art of philosophical speculation. I
do not mean an art that depends either on erudition or on the
skills of the laboratory. On the contrary it is an art that the
metaphysician is as apt to sin against as the common man. It is
an art that the leaders of men betray at least as often as do
those they lead. It is an art that is not taught in the schools,
and rarely in the colleges. Instead, there are special crafts and
professions the primary purpose of which is to confound this
art altogether. It is an art that established authority always
suspects and often represses. In some countries today the prac-
tice of it is forbidden under the severest penalties. And yet, in
this age wherein the techniques of propagandism are so highly
developed, there is perhaps no art that it is more imperative
for men to learn.

These are bold statements, but anyone who will take the
trouble sincerely to contemplate the history of disputations con-
cerning this word “liberty” and its meaning can be convinced,
I believe, of their truth. Whatever liberty is, all men are agreed
that its presence or absence is of vital importance to them.

278

ROBERT M. MACIVER

279

Whatever liberty is, they have always been ready to fight for
it — or about it. But for all the fighting and all the disputing
the same confusions and sophistications flourish today, flourish
as persistently and as triumphantly as ever in the past. Here
there is no record of progress. While we have conquered great
kingdoms of knowledge, while we have been penetrating to
the heart of the atom and to inconceivably far-off galaxies, we
have attained no consensus concerning the condition of this lib-
erty that touches all of us so nearly. Statesmen and even scien-
tists, men of letters and men of law, perpetuate the same mis-
conceptions about it that we find at the very dawn of reflection.
And if we have not attained any greater clarity or any greater
understanding it is not because we are dealing with something
in itself abstruse and baffling — it is rather because our interests,
our prejudices, our warm immediate impulses will not let us
approach it, examine it, and see it for what it is.

We will devote our attention to one thing only — the mean-
ing of a word. How do we ascertain this meaning? There is no
question of validity or invalidity in the mere assertion: “I
attach this meaning to this symbol.” It may be a kind of anti-
social act to use a word in a very different sense from that of
its common acceptance, but this is in itself no offense against
the integrity of thought. In a specialized context it may be
appropriate, or even necessary — since there are always more
meanings than available words — to use a common word in a
specialized sense. Where then does the offense come in? When
can we justly speak of the perversion of meaning?

The word we are concerned with is one of universal use.
The philosopher and the scientist have no technical term to
substitute for it. It signifies an immediate datum, something
that cannot be analyzed into components or reduced to simpler
elements. It signifies the state of being free, and this being free
is as ultimate as being warm or pleased or angry. One indica-
tion of the ultimate character of the concept is that while in
the English language we have two words for it (“liberty” and
“freedom”) no perceptible nuance of difference has developed
in the generic usage of them. How can we define a word of this
sort? We cannot use other words that more clearly express its

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280

meaning. We can, of course, offer cases and illustrations. We
can relate its meaning to other meanings. We can consider the
conditions on which the state of being free depends. We can
bring out its implications. We can specify particular modes of
its manifestation, particular areas in which it is present or ab-
sent, as when we speak of religious liberty, economic liberty,
political liberty, and so on. We can specify within any given
situation who is free and in what respect. We can turn about
and define it indirectly, as the absence of its negation, the ab-
sence of restraint. But in all this we are merely identifying a
meaning, not defining it. It is a meaning we must simply recog-
nize, simply accept. The universality of usage sets it for us. It
is understood by the child and by the savage as well as by the
civilized man. It is a meaning we cannot do without, and thus
we find that when people offer us some alternative and differ-
ent meaning they nonetheless imply that it is equivalent to
the universally accepted meaning. Here, as we shall see, is the
root of the worst perversions. On this account much that is
written on the subject of liberty is worse than futile. It con-
fuses the issues, obscures that which it pretends to clarify, even
sophisticates liberty into its own contradiction. Hence the great-
est sinners against reason have been the reasoners, the philoso-
phers, and high priests.

The history of the more pretentious writings on liberty, from
the time of Plato to the present day, amply substantiates this
charge, but within our present limits all we can do is to point
out the nature of the more persistent and frequent miscon-
ceptions . 1

We begin with those w 7 ho honestly accept the universal
meaning but, being led to define it by the double negative, as
the absence of restraint, are never able to see it positively again
and fall in consequence into immediate error. Their argument
runs as follows: liberty is the absence of restraint, therefore all
restraint is a curtailment of liberty. They reason in the void of
their negatives. Shall we, to bring them back to common sense,
add yet another negative, and ask them, What then of the

1 The best analysis of the subject within my knowledge is Dorothy Fosdick’s
book, What Is Liberty ? > New York, 1939.

ROBERT M. MAC IYER

28l

restraint of restraint? Is it not obvious that liberty — except on
a desert island, where, alas, it is an unprized commodity — is
subject to constant invasion and must be constantly safe-
guarded? Is it not obvious that the absence of restraint, whereby
men in society enjoy any kind of liberty, is the presence of
superior restraint on the forces that would suppress this liberty?

Here the commonest form of error is that which rests on the
simple antithesis of the realm of liberty and the realm of law;
one the “free” life of man in nature or in nonpolitical society
and the other the coercive order of the State. Many writers on
liberty have been content with this untenable antithesis. It was
the view of Thomas Hobbes that liberty existed only in the
interstices of law. And his contention has been upheld with
undiminished vigor by many later schools, by the utilitarians
such as Bentham and Mill, by the Neo-Darwinians such as
Herbert Spencer, by the robust individualists and nature-
worshipers after the manner of Thoreau, by the philosophical
anarchists, and by the economic conservatives who at the pres-
ent day echo the sentiments of Herbert Hoover’s trumpet blast,
The Challenge to Liberty . Every law, they say, is an encroach-
ment on liberty. Every new law reduces yet further the
shrunken area of liberty.

Yet the argument is most patently fallacious. You cannot
think about it without discovering its error. True, every law
restrains some liberty for some. But in so doing it may well
establish some other liberty for some others — or indeed for all.
The law that forbids an employer to dismiss a worker because
he joins a trade union gives the worker a liberty that, as worker,
he lacked before. The law that forbids another to trespass on
my property assures me the liberty to enjoy my property.
Every law establishes an obligation, but the obligation is the
reverse side of a right. The obligation may lie on the many
and the right rest in the few, as for example under a law impos-
ing a censorship of opinion. Or the right may be established
for the many and the corresponding obligation be imposed on
the few, as when a law compels factory-owners to introduce
safety devices. Since liberty does not exist in the void but in
the relations between men, all liberties depend on restraints

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282

just as all rights depend on obligations. The naive Hobbesian
stand ignores this simple truth.

In a deeper sense too it misapprehends alike the nature of
liberty and the nature of law. Laws may be tyrannous, but
tyranny is the quality of particular enactments and has nothing
to do with the essential character of law. Law is not command,
though many jurists have mistakenly defined it so. A legal code
is a system regulating human relationships within the frontiers
of a State and applying to all who live within it. It is a neces-
sary basis of social order, a guaranty that men will act on cer-
tain principles in their intercourse with one another, that, for
example, they will fulfill their contracts and will not use vio-
lence to gain their ends. Remove this system, and every com-
plex society would be reduced to chaos. Men could not foresee
the consequences of their actions, could not undertake any en-
terprise that looked beyond the moment, could not possess any
security of mind or body. The liberties we possess are relative
to the social order in which we live and in large measure are
created as w r ell as sustained by that order. When our rights
perish our liberties perish too. How vain then is the saying
that liberty exists only “in the interstices of law”!

When men define liberty as the absence of restraint, the
trouble frequently is that they at once think of some kinds of
restraint and forget others altogether. They do not realize that
in every society all kinds of restraints and liberties — legal, con-
stitutional, economic, social, moral, religious — inevitably coexist
in endless combinations for the different groups who live in
the same community. There is no simple totality that may be
named the liberty of the individual or the liberty of the peo-
ple. When Herbert Hoover, in the book already referred to,
speaks of “the American system of liberty,” he finds it realized
in the particular range of economic liberties that depend on
equal legal rights, with practically no reference to the oppor-
tunities and conditions on which the exercise of these rights
depends. He opposes economic controls by government, not on
the ground that they are misguided but on the ground that
they cause “myriad wounds to liberty.” He decries “regimented
agriculture” as a blow to liberty, without inquiring whether

ROBERT M, MAC IYER 283

the farmers, wisely or unwisely, want the “regimentation.” He
decries “regimented currency,” without considering that cur-
rency is always “regimented” — by someone. The controls he
disapproves, wisely or unwisely, he regards as inconsistent with
liberty or even as part of “the American system of liberty.” He
seems scarcely conscious of the fact that if two thousand indi-
viduals are in a position to control or direct half the industiy
of the country, therein also lies an important aspect of the
problem of liberty.

Every law restrains some liberty, but before we can condemn
it on that account we must put to ourselves two vital questions.
First, whose liberty? For every law gives some men something
that they will to have or to do, while restraining them, and all
other men, in the contrary direction. Second, what liberty?
For there are many kinds of liberty, and they conflict one with
another, and some can be attained only by the restriction of
others, and the advancement of one man’s liberty generally
means the setting of a limit to the similar liberty of another
man. In the simplest terms, when one man or one group domi-
nates another, they arrogate to themselves precisely the kind
of liberty over others that they deny the others over them-
selves. Certain liberties are incompatible with one another,
certain liberties are again incompatible with the possession by
others of the like liberty. Therefore the answer to the ques-
tion, What liberty? involves always a comparison of liberties
and an assessment of their relative values. Here, incidentally,
is where the negative definition of liberty as the absence of
restraint proves quite unhelpful. For instance, I regard the
liberty of men to think as they please as more important, more
valuable, than the liberty of other men to control their think-
ing. The absence of one kind of restraint means far more to
me than the absence of another kind of restraint. So I am
driven back to the ultimate, the positive, and yet not further
definable meaning of liberty. Then the problem of liberty be-
comes a far more complex one than it seemed at first, when we
were content with the negative definition. For now we have to
ask: What combination of liberties and restraints is most

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serviceable for the existence of what men seek when they place
a high value on liberty?

Of such a nature are the more significant and searching ques-
tions that emerge when we pass beyond the elementary confu-
sions that beset our thinking on the subject. But our immediate
concern is with these confusions, and so we proceed to a second
group of them. Here we meet the people who start from the
universal meaning of liberty but, finding that the state of being
free is realized for themselves under certain conditions, forth-
with postulate that liberty itself, liberty for all men, is attained
under the same conditions. They confound their personal lib-
erty, or the liberty of some group to which they belong, with
universal liberty. There are certain things they want to do,
certain goals they want to achieve. If there is no restraint on
this doing or achieving, that is liberty enough for all men. If
all men are free to worship their God, that is religious liberty.
If all men are free to express the opinions they cherish, that is
intellectual liberty. Since their God is the true God and their
opinions the right opinions, it must be so. They bid us, for
example, distinguish liberty from license, license being the lib-
erty to do the things they disapprove. They believe in eco-
nomic liberty, meaning thereby, if they are employers, the right
to run their business as they please, to hire and fire as they
please. They believe in “liberty of contract,” and maintain,
with the Supreme Court in the case of Adair vs. the United
States, that “the right of the employee to quit the service of
the employer, for whatever reason, is the same as the right of
the employer, for whatever reason, to dispense with the services
of such employee.” They think it is no interference with the
liberty of opinion to restrain the opinion of radicals, if they
themselves are conservative, or the opinion of conservatives, if
they themselves are radical. They universalize as liberty for all
men what is liberty only for the particular group, persuasion, or
class to which they adhere.

This interest-limited conception of liberty explains the de-
feats that the principle of liberty has suffered in many of the
battles won in its name. The demand for liberty is a most
powerful incentive when it is directed against a particular op-

ROBERT M. MACIVER 2 % $

pressor or a particular oppression. But those who win liberty
for their own cause often refuse it to others. Sects that resist
to the death the intolerance of established faiths may become
no less intolerant when they in turn are established. Nations
that have won political liberties have often used their new-
found strength to dominate other nations. The principle of lib-
erty is most apt to be defeated by its own triumphs.

From the interest-limited conception of liberty it is only one
step to the final perversion. We have thus far confined our-
selves to such views as profess to mean by liberty that which
is its universal meaning. About this universal meaning there
can be no doubt. The child knows it who is forced to work
when he wants to play. The savage knows it who is prevented
from following his tribal customs. The criminal knows it who
is put behind prison bars. The property-owner knows it who
is not allowed to use his property as he pleases. Everywhere
in human society, for better or worse, there are hindrances
and prohibitions set by the will of others to that which we want
to do, and everywhere the condition of which we are thus de-
prived is called liberty. The meaning of the term may be ex-
tended to include the absence of other obstacles to action than
those that depend on the will of men to prevent our acting,
though then the word “opportunity” is more appropriate than
the word “liberty.” . Or again it may be extended to include
the absence of hindrances in ourselves to the fulfillment of the
things our hearts desire. Thus we speak of men as being “slaves
to their habits.” But this is clearly an analogical variant of the
universal meaning, not to be pressed too far, certainly not to
be made the ground for a redefinition of a term so necessary,
so widely used, so unmistakable in its primary applications. The
partisans of every cause have redefined the term “liberty,”
as something else than that which men everywhere mean by
it, as something identifying it with their particular cause,
thereby creating the worst confusions. They redefine it, and
still they appeal to the emotions generated by the universal
meaning. They redefine it, and transfer to this new meaning
the values that properly attach to the original meaning. This

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286

is a far worse offense than those we have already indicated.
This offense is “the lie in the soul.”

Yet a long line of philosophers have followed this fashion.
In the modern world it was set by Rousseau and it attained
its philosophical culmination in Hegel, Today it is exploited
most notably, though far from exclusively, by the apologists
of antilibertarian forms of government. For the curious thing
about these final perversions is that they enable men to justify
in the name of liberty the most extreme suppressions of lib-
erty. Our modern sophists draw a distinction between real
liberty and apparent liberty. They proclaim that we are free
only when we do what we ought to do — or rather what they
think we ought to do; only when we desire what we ought to
desire — what they think we ought to desire. They say that lib-
erty is self-realization, the realization of the true self. They
say that we find liberty in surrender to the “law” of our being,
to the law of God, to the law of the State as the organic whole
in which we are fulfilled. They do not say that self-realization
is good and liberty is good, and seek for some relation between
them. They say the one is the other. If they make any dis-
tinction at all, it is between a superficial and spurious liberty
on the one hand and true liberty on the other. So Bernard
Bosanquet, for example, contrasted our “actual” will and our
“real” will. With sublime Hegelian arrogance they confer real-
ity on what they think ought to be, and degrade to unreality
that which they think ought not to be.

So it is not surprising that they often end by merging liberty
in its own contradiction. It is the supreme example of having
one’s cake and eating it too. Rousseau again led the way when
he spoke of men being “forced to be free.” He was not con-
tent with saying “forced to be good,” “forced to be rational.”
He gloried in what seemed to him only a paradox — instead
of a perversion. In this he has had a multitude of followers.
They transmuted liberty into self-surrender, self-abnegation,
obedience, subjection. Hegel reconciled the opposites by an-
nouncing that they were one" The individual who is “forced
to be free” might protest, but of course it is not his true self
that protests. Hegel knows better. In the same spirit Treitschke

ROBERT M. MACIVER 287

explained that Germany would restore the people of Alsace
“against their will to their true selves . 73 In the same spirit
Gentile explains that the absolute corporate State confers more
liberty than the democratic State. In the same spirit Spengler
and Spann and Freyer and the whole host of Nazi apologists
explain that dominance, mastery, totalitarian authority, assure
to those subjected to them the blessings of “true liberty . 77

These apologists will not face the issue that they value other
things more highly than liberty and that they reject liberty for
the sake of those other things. That position would at least be
honest. Instead, they pervert the universal meaning of liberty
in order to deny the most obvious of facts. They would destroy
the meaning of liberty because they are afraid to admit its
meaning. They call it something else, hoping that thus no one
will claim it for what it is.

So after the many centuries in which men have talked and
written of liberty we find proclaimed from the high places
doctrines more perverse and fallacious than ever were uttered
at the beginning of reflective thought. I have tried to show
that each of these doctrines rests on a quite elementary error,
on the most simple inability — or unwillingness — to apply the
art of thinking. Liberty cannot be identified with any cause —
except the cause of liberty — for its whole challenge is for the
right to choose between causes. The analysis of the meaning
of liberty, in its application to social realities, opens up the
most fruitful questions. They remain mostly unexplored. We
cannot advance to the mote meaningful problems because they
lie beyond this ever renewed fog of intellectual confusion.

Charles A. Beard

Visiting Professor of Government, Columbia University

FREEDOM IN POLITICAL
THOUGHT

I N the vocabulary of political thought, the two words “free-
dom” and “liberty” are interchangeable. Although there
has been a tendency in the English-speaking world to treat
“liberty” as “something French, foolish and frivolous,” and
“freedom” as “English, solid, and sensible,” there is no ground
whatever for the distinction. Freedom is, of course, older in
the Anglo-Saxon tongue, but the two words have been em-
ployed in English thought as substantially identical in mean-
ing since the fourteenth century. In their deeper origins, in
fact, they possessed strikingly similar characteristics.

Liberty stems from the Latin word liber , which had a dou-
ble meaning: (i) free or unrestrained, and (2) especially in
plural form “the free members of a household.” In Old Eng-
lish “free” meant in the ordinary sense “dear” as applied to
the free members of a household. It stemmed from freon, to
love, whence the current word “friend”; and freedom has car-
ried the double meaning of liber from time immemorial.
Neither origin nor historical usage warrants any material dis-
tinction between freedom and liberty.

In persistent usage, it is significant to note, freedom and
liberty have had negative and positive features. Both have
meant exemption or release from bondage, servitude, and arbi-
trary power — as among the ancient Romans and the early Eng-
lish. At the same time both have meant a given condition for
human beings— the positive enjoyment of rights and privileges

CHARLES A, BEARD

289

in the household or family of human beings. All through writ-
ten history to the latest hour negative and positive connota-
tions have been associated with freedom and liberty. On the
one side is protection against the arbitrary power of govern-
ment and persons, and on the other side is the enjoyment of
rights belonging to human beings conceived as something more
than the beasts of the field. To lose sight of either connotation
is to miss both the substance and power of freedom.

On the negative side exists a vast body of laws, customs, and
practices safeguarding freedom, that is, the emancipation of
persons from bondage and from the arbitrary power of gov-
ernment. Under this head come the agelong efforts to estab-
lish the rule of law, as distinguished from willful, irregular,
and uncontrolled acts of sheer force exerted by rulers, bandits,
wandering soldiers, and mobs. The results of such efforts are
incorporated in various declarations of rights, in the limitations
on government incorporated in the Constitution of the United
States and in the constitutions of the several States, and ex-
tended by legislation and by judicial interpretation. The bare
summary of the elements of freedom from arbitrary action
would fill a volume. These features are well known and, despite
variations of detail in interpretation, are generally agreed upon.

Such rules of law and practice are negations on power. They
forbid legislatures to trespass upon freedom of press and speech,
to deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due
process of law, to pass any ex post facto law, to impose pen-
alties on any person by bill of attainder, to enact any laws re-
specting the establishment of a state religion. To be sure, such
limitations protect persons in the positive enjoyment of cer-
tain rights, privileges, and immunities, but iif essence they are
negative as expressions of law. And as recent experiences with
dictatorships show, they may be brushed aside by governments
based upon the exercise of sheer and arbitrary power.

There is profound truth in Alexander Hamilton’s statement
in Number 84 of The Federalist to the effect that such princi-
ples as freedom of the press cannot be forever guaranteed by
mere constitutional provisions. “Security of the press,” he said,
“whatever fine declarations may be inserted in any constitu-

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290

tion respecting it, must altogether depend on public opinion
and on the general spirit of the people and the government.”
No doubt the very existence of declarations of rights in sol-
emn documents of public law does act as a salutary force in
restraining public officials; yet the well- framed proclamations
of the Weimar Constitution were easily swept into the discard
by Adolf Hitler and his Storm Troopers. Something more is
needed to preserve freedom than verbal proclamations. Under-
lying all practice in this respect are the thought, scheme of
values, and resolve of a sufficient body of people in every coun-
try to sustain assertions of freedom made in the form of law.

If we are to get at the sustaining convictions which give
w force to paper formulations of freedom, we must examine the
thought that has accompanied the rise, growth, assertion, and
defense of freedom. How have asserters and defenders of free-
dom looked upon the world of human beings? What assump-
tions have they made respecting humanity? What values have
they accepted as primordial? What promises of freedom have
they found in the very nature or constitution of mankind?

Witnesses for freedom start with a conviction respecting
human nature, for it is with human beings, not material things,
that they are primarily concerned. They assume and believe
that the human being is in fact not a mere beast of the field,
despite all the animal characteristics which unite humanity with
the animal kingdom. Whatever men and women are, they are
not apes, lions, tigers, or elephants. The products of inven-
tion, accumulated cultural goods, and “the funded wisdom of
the race” support the conclusion.

Though obvious, the distinction is fundamental. It forms a
starting point for*considering all the features of freedom, such
as capacity for self-restraint, consciously directed effort, or con-
formity with the requirements of common interest. It recog-
nizes the fact that human beings are to some extent educable,
despite all physical and biological determinism. It makes all
mere animal analogies, such as the habits of bees and ants,
merely illustrative at best, and inapplicable to human affairs
in any case. Even if the whole Darwinian hypothesis respecting
human origins be accepted, it yet remains a fact that there is a

CHARLES A. BEARD

291

break between the highest of the anthropoids and human beings.
Whether this break should be ascribed to “sports” or accidents
in nature, to a struggle for existence in peculiar circumstances,
to physical developments, such as the apposition of the thumb
and forefinger, matters little for practical purposes. Whatever
their origins, human beings are differentiated from the rest of
the animal kingdom by physical and psychic characteristics of
their own. This is not academic. It means, in thought about
human freedom, a certain degree of emancipation from the
mechanism of biology, if contemporary biology may be called
mechanical.

Starting with the human being so conceived, advocates of
freedom assert that human life has a value in itself, and that
the human being should not be used for purposes alien to
humanity, as other animals are brought into servitude. To
some extent this assumption is an ethical imperative, but to a
large extent it represents the realism of experience. The story
of “man’s inhumanity to man” is certainly long and makes
painful reading. Cold-blooded murders, endless slaughters in
war, the cruelties often associated with chattel slavery, and end-
less violations of liberty, do present glaring contradictions to
the assumption that human life has a value in itself. This is
undeniable, and human conduct to the latest moment provides
brutal illustrations.

Yet on the other side is the record of manifestations sup-
porting the assertion — all the arts and practices of peace, indus-
tries, institutions of beneficence, the pronouncements of ethical
teachers, the essences of the great religions, the endless striv-
ing for human good. Even under chattel slavery, save in its
most barbaric form, the slave was accorded some rights of hu-
manity. They were meager enough ; but such as they were they
indicated a break with mere bestiality. And chattel slavery has
been almost completely outlawed by civilization. Nor is it with-
out significance that this outlawry has accompanied the devel-
opment of the spirit of freedom in Western civilization. So
the assumption that human life has a value in itself and must
be accorded some rights not granted to other animals is not a

292 FREEDOM

mere theory, a mere ethical imperative; it is rooted in vast
experience.

Associated with the assumption and belief that human life
has a value in itself and that human beings are and must be
accorded rights appropriate to humanity is another conception
— a conception of human nature itself. In extreme form this
conception represents the human being as innately good, and
therefore worthy and capable of enjoying and preserving free-
dom. In this form it is placed in contrast with the conception
of the human being as an animal or as innately evil and un-
worthy of liberty. Those who uphold the one side point to the
manifestations of good, of sacrifice, and of mutual aid in his-
tory. Those who uphold the other side point to the evil, the
selfishness, and “tooth and claw struggle” in history. But
neither side can really strike a balance and demonstrate what
the proportions are. And since history is not and cannot be an
exact science, the problem must forever remain unsolved.

Does the evil in human nature outweigh the good in sub-
stance and in practice? The question is unanswerable, no mat-
ter what assertions are made under that head. Yet good there
is, and advocates of freedom who hold their ground without
taking on the airs of omniscience lay emphasis on the good;
and by so doing doubtless aid in bringing forth the good in
creating the reality asserted by their belief. Nothing is more
clearly established in historical experience than the fact that
even a myth may help to create the very substance of things
hoped for and dreamed of. That which is affirmed by experi-
ence, such as the former universality of chattel slavery, may
be hastened to destruction by the constant reiteration that it is
contrary to human rights asserted and assumed; and the rights
asserted against experience may be realized. Whatever the
future may hold, advocates of freedom do lay emphasis on the
good that is in human nature^

Implicit in the conception of human rights and innate good-
ness is the idea of moral equality. The term “equality” is un-
fortunate, but no other word can be found as a substitute.
Equality means “exactly the same or equivalent in measure,
amount, number, degree, value, or quality.” It is a term exact

CHARLES A. BEARD

293

enough in physics and mathematics, but obviously inexact when
applied to human beings. What is meant by writers who have
gone deepest into the subject is that human beings possess, in
degree and kind, fundamental characteristics that are common
to humanity. These writers hold that when humanity is
stripped of extrinsic goods and conventions incidental to time
and place, it reveals essential characteristics so widely distrib-
uted as to partake of universality. Whether these characteris-
tics be called primordial qualities, biological necessities, resi-
dues, or any other name matters little. No one can truthfully
deny that they do exist. It is easy to point out inequalities in
physical strength, in artistic skill, in material wealth, or in
mental capacity, but this too is a matter of emphasis. At the
end it remains a fact that fundamental characteristics appear in
all human beings. Their nature and manifestations are summed
up in the phrase “moral equality . 55

Emphasis must be placed on the term “moral . 55 From time
immemorial it has been the fashion of critics to point out the
obvious facts that in physical strength, talents, and wealth,
human beings are not equal. The criticism is both gratuitous
and irrelevant. No rational exponent of moral equality has
ever disputed the existence of obvious inequalities among hu-
man beings, even when he has pointed out inequalities which
may be ascribed to tyranny or institutional prescriptions. The
Declaration of Independence does not assert that all men are
equal j it proclaims that they are “created 55 equal.

In essence the phrase “moral equality 55 asserts an ethical
value, a belief to be sustained, and recognition of rights to be
respected. Its validity cannot be demonstrated as a problem
in mathematics can be demonstrated. It is asserted against in-
equalities in physical strength, talents, industry, and wealth.
It denies that superior physical strength has a moral right to
kill, eat, or oppress human beings merely because it is superior.
To talents and wealth, the ideal of moral equality makes a
similar denial of right. And indeed few who imagine them-
selves to have superior physical strength, talents, and wealth
will withhold from inferiors all moral rights. In such circum-
stances government and wealth would go to superior physical

294 FREEDOM

strength $ while virtue and talents would serve the brute man,
as accomplished Greek slaves served the whims, passions, and
desires of Roman conquerors. When the last bitter word of
criticism has been uttered against the ideal of moral equality,
there remains something in it which all, except thugs, must
accept and in practice do accept, despite their sneers and pro-
tests. A society without any respect for human personalities
is a band of robbers, and there is reputed to be honor even
among thieves.

This doctrine of moral equality implicit in the ideal of free-
dom is no newfangled creation of modern times, designed as
cynics have it to authorize the weak to prey upon the strong.
It is as old as civilization itself. Indeed we may regard it as
older, even if we dismiss the cosmogony expressed in the
medieval lines :

“When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman ?”

In ancient Greece the conception of moral equality, if with
qualifications, appeared in the Hellenistic age. As Crane Brin-
ton 1 admirably sums up the state of thought on the subject:
“Herodotus is emphatic on the contrast between irresponsible
Persian rule and Greek isonomia , equality before the law.
Athenian i$otimia> equal respect for all, and isegoria, equal
freedom of speech and hence of political action, together with
that regard for equal opportunity so evident in Pericles’
funeral speech make up a conception of equality not unlike
that of the early, hopeful days of the French Revolution.” In
short, civilized Greeks proclaimed and adhered to an ideal of
moral equality and, amid glaring contradictions, applied it to
some extent in practice. And at no time were the leading phi-
losophers unaware of the glaring contradictions.

Even from Rome, with all its ruthless force and stratifica-
tion of classes, the idea of equality was not absent. The idea
crept into Roman law, especially in the later days when jurists
had to deal with all sorts and conditions of people who were

1 Article in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. V, p. 574 , to which I
am heavily indebted.

CHARLES A. BEARD

295

not Roman citizens. In the application of jus gentium — the law
of peoples — they came to see that all peoples had qualities in
common, and they reached the conclusion that nature had orig-
inally decreed equality, though institutions and disobedience
had marred it. As Roman thought broadened beyond imme-
diate things, it betrayed a belief in the essential oneness of
humanity, despite glaring contradictions. Epictetus taught that
we are all children of God and are in duty bound to cherish
love for, and practice forbearance toward, one another. Weak-
ness has its inherent rights and strength its moral limitations.
Although nowhere in Roman history appeared a solemn
declaration of the rights of man, all the elements of it could
be gathered from the scattered works of Roman thinkers and
leaders. And great as was the superstructure of force, it could
not perpetuate itself, but crumbled to earth leaving naked hu-
manity to begin over again the work of social and State rebuild-
ing. To the multitudes bereft of their imperial rulers, the
teachings of Roman moralists were more significant than the
memories of the glittering eagles once carried before conquer-
ing armies.

As the empire of force crumbled, as the doctrines of Roman
moralists were forgotten, as their written works were buried in
dust, a new faith in moral worth and equality furnished both
inspiration and a guiding principle for the reordering of hu-
man affairs. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that
the doctrines of Roman moralists had prepared the way for
the triumph of the new faith . 2 Seneca had said that “we are all
akin by nature, which has formed us of the same elements and
placed us here together for the same end.” To a similar con-
clusion the tragic Marcus Aurelius had come: “If our reason
is common, there is a common law. . . . And if there is a
common law we are fellow-citizens ; if this is so, we are mem-

2 Harold Laski, speaking of Stoicism, rightly says : Christianity added
little to this notion by way of substantial content 5 but it added to its force
the impetus of a religious sanction, not improbably the more powerful be-
cause Christianity was in its original phase essentially a society of the disin-
herited, to whom the idea of the eminent dignity of human personality as
such would make an urgent appeal.” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences ,
Vol. IX, pp. 442 8 .

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296

bers of some political community — the world is in a manner
a State.” In such writings had been foreshadowed the elabora-
tion of the teachings of Jesus Christ. And in this new faith
the moral worth of the human personality and the principle
of equality were clearly and categorically asserted. “Of one
blood are all nations of men.” “There is neither Jew nor Greek,
neither bond nor free, neither male nor female; for ye are
all one in Christ Jesus.” If some later theologians tended to
shift this equality from earth to heaven, early Christians did
not take their faith in this supermundane sense alone. They
brought it down to practice in the communities of the early
churches, some going so far as to share the fruits of their prop-
erty. So potent was the Christian faith, so powerful were the
energies inspired by it, that it contributed to sapping and un-
dermining the empire of force into which it was introduced.
Although later entangled in the vested interests of accumu-
lating property and confronted by a feudal hierarchy of class
orders, Christian teachers never entirely abandoned the early
doctrine of human equality. In monastic movements and in
popular tumults, such as those led by Savonarola in Florence
and John Ball in England, appeared the primitive passion for
the unprivileged and for the mere humane.

In Protestantism of the leveling variety moral equality
flamed up in a sacrificial ardor. It produced forms of religious
organization which, on account of equalitarian principles, have
rightly been placed by students of the subject among the fore-
runners of modern democracies. In them was an assertion of
the right of individual conscience demanding respect. In them
was a comradeship and a deep attachment to common good.
As communities, religious congregations stood together against
the oppressions and persecutions of State and Established
Church. As communities many of them migrated to America in
search of freedom for their way of life. Of the Pilgrims at
Plymouth it was written: “We are knit together as a body in
the most sacred covenant of the Lord ... by virtue of which
we hold ourselves tied to all care of each other’s good and of
the whole.” Thus was expressed on the barren coasts of New
England the ancient cry: “And the multitude of them that

CHARLES A. BEARD 297

believed were of one heart and one soul. 77 Despite all formal-
isms, all conformity to power, and all giant masquerades, the
flame of this faith and conviction has never been extinguished.

Closely associated with the levelers in religious organization,
if not stemming from that source, were the levelers in poli-
tics and economics who threatened CromwelPs iron despotism
in England, no less than the power of kings. This obscure and
despised party, thrown up in the Puritan Revolution, united
divinity and nature in the formulation of its doctrines. “All
men, 75 they taught, “are by nature the sons of Adam, and
from him have legitimately derived a natural propriety (prop-
erty), right, and freedom. ... By natural birth all men are
equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty, and freedom,
and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature unto this
world, every one with a natural innate freedom and propriety,
even so we are to live, every one equally and alike, to enjoy
his birthright and privilege. 77

Here, indeed, is evidence of the link of faith in common
humanity that united Christian teachings with the reliance on
nature, and later became the support of equalitarian democracy
and equal rights. Thus all the elements of the Declaration of
Independence in America and of the Declaration of the Rights
of Man in France were formulated more than a century before
those documents appeared, by the English levelers working in
the traditions of Puritan Christianity. Thus, although to some
there seems to be a break in the movement of historic idealism
— a sharp antithesis between divinity and nature, there was
no such break or antithesis in fact. As the great humane teach-
ings of Greece and Rome, which combined divinity and nature,
merged easily with the humane teachings of Christianity, so the
great teachings of the Christian tradition were merged with
the eighteenth-century philosophy of nature. If clerical mo-
nopoly on divine right encouraged an emphasis on natural
right, the two sources of knowledge and inspiration were in
truth never separated. Rather were they interwoven in the
stream of mental and moral energies which drove institutions
and mankind in the direction of a larger freedom 5 so forcibly
indeed and so swiftly that the creed of the despised sect pro-

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298

claimed in the seventeenth century became within two hun-
dred years the creed of a great Respectability.

So it came about that when the philosophers of the eighteenth
century resorted to Nature and applied what they deemed the
cold analysis of reason to royal, feudal, and clerical institu-
tions of prescriptive and vested rights, they actually had behind
them more than twenty centuries of Greek, Roman, and Chris-
tian idealism. If God had not created all human beings free
and equal, as Stoics and Christians had long maintained, at
least Nature and Nature’s God had done just that very thing.
In any case a humane idealism historically rooted in divinity
and nature, equipped with the weapon of reason and the sharp
edge of scientific analysis, sapped and undermined institutions
founded on prescriptive force, overthrew them in thought, and
presided over the revolutions that ushered in modern liberty.
Nothing could be more superficial, therefore, than the idea and
belief that liberty came into being as the result of a temporary
fit of uninformed reason, soon to be submerged forever in a
wave of eternal unreason, emotion, and sheer force. It was,
in truth, governments founded on violence — Alexandrian,
Roman, and royal, that had proved temporary 5 while the
movement of human idealism had been continuous, now under-
ground, now sweeping to victories, now retreating, now ad-
vancing.

Hence, unless knowledge is a delusion, the inescapable con-
clusion: The dogma of human worth, with its implicit equali-
tarianism and liberalism, is as old as civilization and is irrevo-
cably rooted in the very substance of things, whether that very
substance be regarded as a realization of the divine idea or as a
mere result of the material conditions of economic production.
And the force of the ideal forever undermines the force of
brute strength, challenges it, and overthrows it. This seems to
be the very essence of Western history, of which our own times
are a fleeting expression.

Holding to the assumption of human worth and the con-
ception of moral equality, advocates of freedom contend that
human effort can create material and moral conditions in which
human worth, human equality, and human liberty may become

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more perfectly revealed and made more evident in the arrange-
ments of life. It would be possible to amass a mountain of
evidence on this contention from writings strewn through the
centuries, from Greek antiquity to our own times. But no writer
associated with the rise and growth of liberty in the United
States expressed it with more precision than Thomas Jeffer-
son. In a remarkable paper he contrasted his conceptions with
the theories of government generally prevailing in Europe.

“The doctrines of Europe were,” Jefferson said, “that men
in numerous associations cannot be restrained within the limits
of order and justice, but by forces physical and moral, wielded
over them by authorities independent of their will. Hence their
organization of kings, hereditary nobles, and priests. Still fur-
ther to restrain the brute force of the people, they deem it
necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty, and igno-
rance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their
earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain
a sufficient surplus thereby to sustain a scanty and miserable
life. And these earnings they apply to maintain their privi-
leged orders in splendor and idleness, to fascinate the eyes of
the people, and excite in them an humble adoration and sub-
mission, as to an order of superior beings.

“Although few among us had gone to all these lengths of
opinion, yet many had advanced, some more, some less, on the
way. . . . Ours, on the contrary, was to maintain . . . the
will of the people themselves. We believed . . . that man
was a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and
with an innate sense of justice ; and that he could be restrained
from wrong and protected in right, by moderate powers, con-
fided in persons of his own choice and held to their duties
by dependence on his own will. We believed that the compli-
cated organization of kings, nobles, and priests was not the
wisest or best to effect the happiness of associated man 5 that
wisdom and virtue were not hereditary 5 that the trappings of
such a machinery consumed by their expense those earnings of
industry they were meant to protect, and by the inequalities
they produced exposed liberty to sufferance. We believed that
men, enjoying in ease and security the full fruits of their own

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industry, enlisted by all their interests on the side of law and
order, habituated to think for themselves and to follow reason
as their guide, would be more easily and safely governed, than
with minds nourished in error, and vitiated and debased, as in
Europe, by ignorance, indigence, and oppression.”

Holding fast to conceptions of human nature, human rights,
moral equality, and of conditions favorable to the flowering
of these virtues, advocates of liberty have demanded that such
virtues be permitted to unfold against all the handicaps of legal
and economic privileges. This has been regarded all along as
an aspect of the equalitarian trend, and in practice the rise of
political liberty has been accompanied by an upswing of talents
from among the once obscure, unprivileged, and subjugated.
In the Middle Ages the flowering of talents was marked in
handicrafts among the guilds which were, within their limits,
petty democracies, endowed with large rights of self-govern-
ment. Moreover, the Roman Catholic Church drew its monks,
nuns, priests, and bishops from various walks of life. If the
higher posts often went to persons of the privileged classes,
they were by no means closed to the sons and daughters of the
unprivileged. No small part of the Church’s strength has been
and is derived from the fact that its authorities look for talents
and draw talents from every section of its membership, and it
is surely no accident that, despite its defeats on many fronts,
the Church has survived the revolutions that unhorsed kings
and nobles.

In modern times the upswing of talents, favored by the doc-
trine of freedom, appears in every field of human activity — in
invention, business enterprise, industrial management, labor
organizations, the arts, sciences, and letters. When all due re-
spect is paid to the perfections of medieval art, architecture,
and handicrafts, and the demerits of the modern “cheap and
nasty” are recognized, the achievements in all the enterprises
and arts that sustain humanity and adorn human nature in the
centuries that witnessed the rise of political freedom stand un-
impeachable. Comparisons of particular merits may yield no
general conclusions. Indications of particular shortcomings
prove no moral. The flowering of individual talents has been

CHARLES A* BEARD 301

and remains an aspect of freedom — one of its asserted and
cherished values.

Such are broad tendencies of thought and conviction respect-
ing the nature of humanity which underly the modern con-
ception of freedom and its corollary — self-government as dis-
tinguished from government superimposed by force. In these
tendencies mankind has been deemed fundamentally worthy of
freedom and rightfully destined to enjoy freedom within the
circle of law expressing the sentiments and ideas of self-
government. Freedom has been deemed a value in itself, at-
tached to the status and dignity of the human being. It has
been deemed also an eternal force, a sacred fire in the human
breast, working forever, even in prisons and dungeons, against
despotism in every form.

Will this thought and this conviction perish from the earth
and give place to the thought and conviction that a self-chosen
and self-constituted few are now to extinguish the idea of free-
dom and make some kind of Asiatic tyranny the final shape
of government and social living throughout the world? There
is no exact science of society which enables us to answer that
question. We have only the lamp of experience to guide us —
our own experience and the records of history.

Since the beginning of civilization there has been a struggle
between sheer force and humanity, between the few who have
sought dominance by physical might and the many who have
sought to protect and govern themselves under customs and
rules of their own making. The contest has been waged under
many names, with varying phrases of justification and defense,
but in fact it has continued through the centuries. Sheer force
has clothed itself in different forms at different ages. In early
times it put forward no ethical pretensions. The war lord and
his companions, for love of plunder and excitement, fell upon
their neighbors, seized their lands and goods, conquered them,
and settled down upon them, without making any explana-
tions or claiming to bestow any benefits. In the beginning was
the deed, and the deed was sufficient for the victor. No high-
flown phrases represented the act as good. No system of world
philosophy made it appear both necessary and beneficial to

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conqueror and victim. No religious sanctions covered it with
the will or mercy of God. The records of such acts of power
appear in the early passages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
which describes deeds of conquest and plunder without any
embellishments of morality or learning.

After sheer force took on the habiliments of civilization it
was decorated by various titles. The war lord became the
absolute monarch and claimed to rule by the grace of God.
Huge volumes were written in justification of the power so
exercised. At other times and in various places, sheer force
appeared under the name of dictatorship. “Every man the least
conversant in Roman story,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in
The Federalist , “knows how often that republic was obliged to
take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the
formidable title of dictator, as well against the intrigues of
ambitious individuals who aspired to the tyranny, and the sedi-
tions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threat-
ened the existence of all government, as against the invasions
of external enemies who menaced the conquest and destruction
of Rome.”

At other times sheer force appeared as the imperator , the
military commander raised to supreme power in civil govern-
ment through the support of his soldiers. Caesar and Napoleon
were examples. Once installed, the imperium was clothed with
insignia and called divine, and efforts were made to give it
the appearance and substance of eternity. Whether it was the
war lord of the naked deed, the absolute monarch by divine
right, the dictator prolonging his temporary assignment, the
tyrant, or the emperor, sheer force meant the subjection of the
multitudes, high and low, to the will, the passions, and the dis-
tempers of the master. Fear might check him. The peril of
assassination might moderate his despotism. In his greed he
might overreach himself and pull down his own system. But
the people whom he ruled were subjects obeying his orders,
yielding their labor and goods to his agents, fighting his wars,
building monuments to his glory, and accepting his laws. Sub-
mission and servitude were their lot.

Yet accompanying the manifestations of sheer force have

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303

been, in many times and places since the beginning of civiliza-
tion, institutions of check and control set up in the name of
freedom. The stark war lord did not fight his battles alone.
He had companions with whom he took some counsel. The king
in early England had his council, which developed into the
Witenagemot, or assembly of wise men. The emperor Napoleon
I had his four-chambered legislature in which even “clodhop-
pers,” as he called them, had a weak and ineffectual voice.
Napoleon III, raised to power by a plebiscite and seeking to
emulate his uncle, was compelled to make concessions to parlia-
mentary government on the eve of his downfall in war. Where
absolutism did not yield, bend, and make concessions, it was in
many times and places overthrown by revolution from below:
the British Revolution of 1649, the French Revolution of 1789,
the Russian Revolution of 1917. Indeed it is impossible to
find in history anywhere back of the twentieth century a
despotism which did not disappear in violence or was not, like
the British monarchy, tempered down into weakness by revo-
lution and institutions of popular control, with varying degrees
of popular freedom. If the fullness of truth be our goal, it is
necessary therefore to parallel the history of sheer force with
the history of endless efforts more or less popular to subdue
it to institutions of control directed by a portion of the people
in the interest of freedom.

At the opening of the twentieth century it appeared that
popular government accompanied by checks and balances con-
ceived in the interest of freedom was destined to spread to all
quarters of the globe. Then came a reaction, such as had punc-
tuated the whole movement for freedom since the beginning
of the Renaissance. Now we are in the midst of that reaction,
and there are prophets engaged in foretelling the complete and
final triumph of that reaction.

We cannot discover in the nature of history anything that
enables us to make out of knowledge unequivocal predictions
such as the chemist can make when an event is precipitated in
a chemical compound. But in the very nature of history we do
observe the long and tenacious struggle between humanity and
brute force, between freedom and arbitrary power $ and we

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can scarcely escape the conclusion that this struggle will not
be closed either immediately or in the distant future by any
acts of any despots. If we know anything about history we
know that its continuous flowing into the future will not be
halted by new Alexanders, Caesars, Napoleons, Death is as
merciless to them as it is to common clay. Their mortal coil is
shuffled off. Their governments collapse. Their empires dis-
solve, Their despotisms sink into the dust. That much seems
to be, indeed is, established by the record of long human ex-
perience.

We know also that humanity alone survives amid the decay
and collapse of royal families and dictatorial dynasties. If his-
tory goes on, it will continue to survive. If humanity goes on,
the thought and conviction respecting the worth, values, and
freedom of humanity that have accompanied the rise of civiliza-
tion will unfold, here weakly, there strongly. Those, then, who
believe in freedom as restraints on arbitrary power and as a
good in itself may take courage. The very stars may not be
marshaled on their side, but undying forces of humanity
march with them. Despair and defeat may threaten them, but
the conviction that the noblest thought of thirty centuries be-
longs to them, and not to tyrants, sustains them in a conflict
that is never won triumphantly and yet never lost beyond hope
of recovery. If this is an illusion, they may at least draw in-
spiration from the knowledge that tyrants also are passing
shadows.

John M. Clark

Professor of Economics, Columbia University

FORMS OF ECONOMIC LIBERTY
AND WHAT MAKES THEM
IMPORTANT

I. INTRODUCTION

F OR several centuries, culminating in the nineteenth, the
course of European civilization could fairly be plotted in
terms of the progressive achievement of increased lib-
erty: intellectual, social, political, and economic. With a great
European war freshly launched on its path of destruction,
there is no need to remind the reader that this trend has now
been definitely reversed, and that all forms of liberty are now
fighting for their lives. The year 1914 stands as the most fatal
landmark of this reversal. It is true that in the economic field
the growth of public controls had reversed the trend much
earlier, apparently following an independent course. The essen-
tial unity of the crisis of liberty in all fields may not be self-
evident. Yet I believe it to represent the essential truth.

If political freedom means democracy, as may fairly be as-
sumed, there is much reason in the proposition that it is in-
herently hostile to economic freedom in a developed society
in which economic freedom can lead to great inequality and
insecurity for the masses; and that the two are consistent only
in such a simple society as is economically democratic, as well
as free, and. in spite of being free. It has been suggested with
some force that a political system in which power goes by sheer
numbers will not naturally tolerate a free and autonomous
economic system in which power is distributed according to the
command of wealth. Rather, having the ultimate power, the

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political system will take over the economic system and remake
it more nearly in, its own image. If this be the natural tendency,
the effect of it upon the political and intellectual system de-
serves more than a passing thought. In fact, it may turn out
to be the vital and decisive factor in the case. We should seri-
ously consider the possibility that, if political and intellectual
freedom are used to put an end to economic freedom, they may
thereby themselves commit suicide.

It should not be necessary to argue the fact that, in the
realms of action, freedom in itself implies limitations 5 and that
not all restrictions are surrenders of the essential substance of
liberty. And it should not be necessary to argue that freedom
is not one thing, but many, and that some forms may need
to be restricted in the interest of other forms. We have grown
hardened to the opposition that has greeted every new eco-
nomic restriction, on the ground that it was an interference
with “personal liberty.” This was, of course, both true and
untrue. Business liberty is perhaps one form of personal liberty,
though the modern large-scale business institutions have more
the aspect of impersonal organisms. But business liberty is not,
in itself, the thing which is conveyed to the mind by the gen-
eral term, “personal liberty.” They are distinct.

But, while distinct, they are connected in ways which we
are beginning to realize, with the help of what has been hap-
pening in the countries ruled by dictatorships and organized
on a totalitarian basis. While business liberty can and must be
restricted, it seems overwhelmingly probable that it cannot be
wiped out, or restricted beyond its power to maintain a healthy
existence, without wiping out also true personal liberty in all
the more important senses. This is the most important conclu-
sion to which the following examination of the forms of eco-
nomic liberty will lead. It appears to be the paramount factor
in the answer to the question: “Is economic freedom worth
keeping?”

II. BASIC CONCEPTS

In a modern highly specialized society, it seems hopeless to
attempt to define by simple formulas the scope of economic

JOHN M. CLARK - 307

liberty and the limits on restraints. The most characteristic
formula of the age of individualism states that everyone is (or
should be) free to use his own possessions in any way that does
not interfere with the like liberty of others. But upon analysis,
this formula turns out to define nothing. One might be free
to rob one’s neighbors, the neighbors being equally free to do
the same. Or all might be equally free to use a blackjack on
any street corner. Of course, under these conditions no one
would be free to leave his property unprotected by his private
armed force, and have any expectation of finding it when he
returned, nor would anyone be free to walk to his place of
occupation with any assurance of arriving, or returning at night.
The system which this formula was framed to fit protects these
liberties rather than those of the burglar or the wielder of the
blackjack, and with good reason; but the formula does not
specify them. What the formula seems to mean is that there
are certain basic liberties (which the formula itself does not
define) in which all alike have an interest and which are con-
sistent with a constructive scheme of living together, in which
all alike can be protected.

But these universal liberties, while basic, do not carry us far
in explaining the structure of a complex industrial society. In
practical terms, the liberties and restrictions of the hired
worker are different from those of his employer, and neces-
sarily so. If there is something universal underlying this differ-
entiation — and there is — it consists of the liberty of each, if he
will and can, to change his role. And in this case each acquires
the liberties, and becomes subject to the restrictions, which for-
merly pertained to another. Any universal liberty in our sys-
tem hinges on the liberty to change one’s role.

Since there must be restrictions, and since their forms must
change with changing conditions, there is a natural tendency
to look on changes from the standpoint of the new restrictions
they impose, as limitations on liberty, by which is meant limita-
tions on its former scope. This, of course, represents a fact; but
it is not the most important fact in the case. The most impor-
tant fact, if we wish to know whether restrictions have gone
too far, is the scope of liberty that remains. It may be, with

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powers and restrictions both increasing, that the sum of what
we are in effect free to do is increasing also, rather than dimin-
ishing.

If we are to look at the different forms of freedom, we must
ask ourselves: Freedom of whom? Freedom for what? Free-
dom from what? As to the first, we find that there are some
liberties— like the liberty to choose what one will eat for din-
ner— which everyone may and should normally exercise con-
stantly. And there are some — like the liberty to lead a polit-
ical movement or to direct a major industry — for which oppor-
tunity should be open to everyone who can qualify, so far as
practicable, but for which few, in the nature of the case, can
manage to qualify, and which fewer still can hope to exercise
effectively or successfully. It is around this latter group of lib-
erties that some of the most crucial issues hinge today. And
there is a danger, which we must avoid, of thinking that, be-
cause few exercise them at any one time, therefore they are not
important in a democratic society. The conclusion is unwar-
ranted: the reason is insufficient.

The liberties in question are those of leadership and direc-
tion; obviously of crucial importance. And while the major
positions of this sort may be relatively few, nevertheless in a
society with as many groups and group activities as ours, a sur-
prisingly large number of people have the opportunity to exer-
cise leadership in some activity or other. Under authoritarian
leadership individuals may still have limited liberties within a
prescribed system . But leadership and direction must be free, if
the system itself is to have the quality of liberty . To this end it
is necessary, not that every individual should be a leader in
every field, but that any idea or project should have free op-
portunity to prove its usefulness and make its way.

Freedom for what? Here we may broadly distinguish three
major divisions of liberty. One may be classed as liberty to
choose one’s consumption goods from among those that are
available (or to try to secure others which may not be avail-
able). This means not merely such things as ordering one’s
dinner and choosing the color and fabric of one’s clothes; it
means choosing one’s place of residence, one’s recreations, and

JOHN M. CLARK 309

to some extent the educational environment of one’s children.
In a free system it includes the choosing of one’s intellectual
environment, at least as an adult: the pictures one looks at
daily, the newspapers and books one reads, the plays one sees,
the organizations one belongs to, the church one attends. And
it must never be forgotten that this kind of freedom can be
assured only if another kind is also assured. Someone must be
free to supply what the consumer demands, or else the con-
sumer’s freedom is an illusion. And here as elsewhere the
question is not whether any restrictions are imposed, but how
much scope for freedom is left?

A second major division centers on the choice of an occupa-
tion. This commonly means choosing from among the occu-
pations which the existing system holds open. But full liberty
includes the liberty of the rare individual to blaze a new trail
and to do something that has not been done before. And the
importance of this form of liberty is out of all proportion to
the number of those who have the genius to take advantage
of it. Many, of course, are cranks. But the world could not
afford to do without the group which has included Johnny
Appleseed, Luther Burbank, and Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Full liberty calls for something more. One may be free to
choose whether to be an electrician or a garment-maker, with-
out having any part in the decision whether electricians shall
produce radios or something else, or what kind of garments
shall be made and how many, or under what kind of shop con-
ditions. Beyond the choice of an occupation there lies the
choice as to what the array of occupations in the system shall
be, and what shall be produced by them. We may have free-
dom for one kind of choice, but not the other. In fact, social-
istic systems are likely to afford a good deal of liberty of the
first sort, but little or none of the second.

Under a system built on exchange, liberty includes liberty
to alienate things, and partially to alienate one’s liberty for the
future, by binding oneself to contracts or by accepting the disci-
pline that goes with industrial employment. But some mini-
mum of liberty must remain inalienable, and the liberty to
alienate must be correspondingly restricted. This inalienable

FREEDOM

31°

minimum is gradually being extended and includes education,
some rights to health, and, in effect, a minimum of material
goods and services. Traditional individualism, and the legal
system that went with it, overstressed the liberty to alienate
at the expense of the need that the essential conditions of lib-
erty be made and kept inalienable. But this represented merely
one concept of liberty and is not the one now prevailing.

Freedom from what? Certainly not from all outside forces
conditioning one’s actions; that is unthinkable. Primarily, we
mean freedom from coercive authority, wielding irresistible
power and prescribing positively what the individual shall do.
The liberal theory is that government tells people what they
must not do and leaves them free within the limits thus drawn.
Naturally, the area of the verboten must not grow until it
leaves insufficient range of choice open. Also, some positive
requirements are necessary. Even an individualistic state prop-
erly requires parents to care for their children and send them
to school, while anyone who chooses to operate a factory must
meet the requirements of the safety-appliance laws.

There must also be freedom from undue and organized pri-
vate persecution, and to this end the State must set some limit
on the liberty to persecute. Not that anyone ever is, or should
be, free from the pressure of the opinion of his fellows. Such
pressures are omnipresent, whether in Tennessee or Greenwich
Village, making for conformity of some sort. And if an indi-
vidual does not care enough for an independent course of action
to withstand these pressures in their more ordinary forms, he
has simply not earned his liberty. When someone does with-
stand or disregard them, they have a surprising way of vanish-
ing. If someone argues to you that because of these pressures
all freedom is an illusion, he is probably either speaking the
language of metaphysics or trying to seduce you to surrender
what liberty you have to some form of authoritarian control.

Our present economic system is geared to favor innovation
of certain sorts, largely as to technical methods of production
and the introduction of new products. Innovation as to indus-
trial relations is perhaps less easy, but by no means impossible.
Liberty as to styles of living in general seems to be greater

JOHN M. CLARK 3 I I

than it was. It is chiefly radical proposals as to the social system
itself that have to meet the stronger pressures toward con-
formity. But on the whole, we have established a popular atti-
tude which is sufficiently tolerant of nonconformity to permit
it to exist, and even to flourish 3 and that appears to be the
main thing. This state of things could be easily overthrown.
The preservation of it requires the proverbial “eternal vigi-
lance.” We may not be too well satisfied with what we have
in this respect, but it is a precious achievement, imperfect as
it may be, and one not lightly to be abandoned.

There is also freedom from the limitations imposed by pov-
erty, disease, ignorance, weakness, and lack of opportunity.
Full protection of these forms of liberty is impossible, mankind
being what it is. And such protection as is possible requires some
restrictions on some at least of the other forms of liberty. Pro-
tection of freedom from disease requires a public health service
with powers of quarantine and various compulsory preventive
measures. Disease carriers should not be free to be handlers
of food. Rigorous application of the principle of individualistic
liberty would sacrifice many of these other forms of freedom.
And those who reach a socialistic position via humanitarian
and democratic ideals do so because they believe that our tra-
ditional forms of economic liberty are at war with these other
forms, and that the other forms are the more important. This
is a serious issue, not to be dismissed lightly.

Such persons are likely to hold that the traditional individ-
ualistic liberties are formal merely 3 and that the substance of
liberty as distinct from the form depends on what one can do
(with the help of one’s formal liberties) to promote and pro-
tect one’s essential interests. Where so many of us are able to
do so little, there is much reason in the claim that they possess
the form of liberty without the substance. Any real answer to
our present problems should face this issue squarely. It seems
clearly impossible for everyone to possess both complete formal
liberty and complete protection against disease, poverty, igno-
rance, and folly. The real issue is whether a sane balance can
be struck between formal liberty and protection of its “material
content,” or whether we must go to one extreme or the other.

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To what extent, if at all, does real liberty to do something
require that one should also have the ability and the means to
do it? We are not here concerned with attempting to solve
metaphysical problems, but rather to give such clarity as may
be given to the ideas prevalent among common men: the ideas
they work by. And on this basis it seems clear that real liberty
implies opportunity and ability to do something meaningful
directed toward a given end; but that in the nature of the
case, it does not carry a guaranty of success. In that sense, lib-
erty and ability are not synonymous. The content of liberty can
be enriched by increased opportunity and ability to command
the material means of success, and it can be impoverished by
the opposite; but the fact that there are severe limitations on
opportunity and ability does not mean that liberty does not
exist.

My liberty to buy the United States Steel Corporation may
mean nothing; but it is part of my liberty to acquire, a business
enterprise or an interest in one. This may mean more, though
perhaps not enough to make very much impression on a large-
scale economic system. It is in turn part of the general liberty
of any who will and can, to acquire and direct business enter-
prises, large or small. And this means a great deal, whether
or not we are wholly satisfied with the results. It affects the
character of the United States Steel Corporation, whether or
not I personally play any part in this. It affects me if I
buy a loaf of bread baked in an oven made of steel produced
by the Corporation, From the standpoint of liberty, my inability
to buy the Corporation is a serious matter only if liberty to do
this is one of those liberties which do not have their proper
effect unless everyone actually exercises them. Apparently it
does not belong in that class.

A more serious matter is what happens to the liberty to
choose an occupation, when the system is unable to afford jobs
to some millions of the population who need them. This is one
of the liberties which the system requires most of us to exer-
cise; and such widespread inability as now exists is a grave im-
pairment of the substance of this liberty. A socialistic system
could, if it w T ould, increase tremendously the effective content

JOHN M. CLARK 3 I 3

o£ this particular liberty. And it is this one fact, more than any
other, that gives ground for the contention that there would
be more real personal liberty under socialism than under the
system of private enterprise. There would, of course, be a price
to pay. In the first place, the assortment of occupations itself
would be prescribed, not freely worked out (at least, under
socialism of the centrally administered type) ; and in the second
place, the selection of candidates for jobs and for advancement
would be made by a different kind of agency, under different
motives and pressures. How important this would be, we may
inquire into later.

Liberty is always a matter of choice between available alter-
natives; and the available alternatives represent the range of
opportunity. The requirements here are that the range of alter-
natives shall be as rich as possible, as responsive as possible to
the preferences of the people, and as accessible and well known
as possible. This requires the equivalent of a well-organized
market, under any economic system, socialistic or individual-
istic. The socialistic market might be better organized than
the individualistic, though also probably less rich and less re-
sponsive. And the individualistic market is capable of being
much better organized than it is, without ceasing to be indi-
vidualistic. The range of market opportunity can be much im-
proved.

One pair of concepts, the relationships of which are perhaps
most difficult to trace, is liberty and security. Liberty implies
some insecurity, because at bottom it implies testing the effec-
tiveness of available powers and resources, with no absolute
guaranty of a successful outcome. It also implies, in an inter-
dependent society, that the experiments which some of us try
may have unexpected effects on the rest of us and may make
us to that extent insecure. Yet liberty also requires some degree
of underlying security if it is to have much effective meaning
and content. We must be able to count on something, or our
experiments can only end in disaster.

This issue is harder to formulate in a satisfactory universal
generalization than to settle in particular cases. We can afford
purchasers security against physically harmful foods and let

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3 I 4

them govern their own diet within the very wide range of
choice that would be left; while the range of liberty that
would be left to the food-producing industries would not be
restricted in such a way as to cripple any of its defensible activi-
ties. On much the same terms we can control individual behav-
ior sufficiently to afford a degree of security against epidemic
diseases which would come much closer than we now do to the
standard which our medical knowledge permits. This means
increased restriction of personal liberty; and a perfect result
(within the limits of existing medical knowledge) might not
be humanly possible. We can guarantee everyone security
against absolute economic disaster and still leave individuals
free to achieve what status they can, above the assured mini-
mum; but there can be no general guaranty against failure to
achieve the sort of economic position people choose to strive
for, or the sort they set as a satisfactory standard.

The security to which people generally feel they have a
just claim is the opportunity to do some work of a worth-while
character and to receive a reward bearing a proper relation to
the worth of what they do. Recognizing the difficulty of de-
fining worth, it seems clear that this claim is difficult to satisfy,
consistently with leaving private enterprise a fair opportunity
to reabsorb the unemployed. If the standard of worth is set by
political processes, it seems certain to be set too high to meet
the requirements of private reabsorption. One theoretical
standard might be the assurance of such a level of income that
the worker would feel that, in accepting any offer that might
be made by private enterprise, he was not being coerced by the
force of hard necessity, but was free. In practice, this standard
would be hopelessly indefinite; and any practical attempt to
construe it would almost certainly set it too high for private
industry to outbid successfully.

It appears that we are not in a position to guarantee universal
security, in the shape of freedom from fear of losing one’s job
and of being forced to accept something poorer, or even endur-
ing some real hardship and privation, if one does not meet fair
standards of performance. Even a socialistic society would have
to have some jobs of a disciplinary sort, involving hardship; as

JOHN M. CLARK 3 I 5

well as many of a distinctly unsatisfactory sort for those who
do not succeed in qualifying for the better positions. And here
there would be the likelihood that the assignment of these jobs
would be governed to a large extent by considerations other
than industrial capacity and performance. And this would in-
troduce another kind of insecurity, some aspects of which might
be even more serious.

Liberty is a burden as well as a privilege 5 and the actual
exercise of undictated and unguided free choice in every act of
life would overburden all of us. Therefore the -most basic form
of liberty is the liberty to choose how much liberty one will
exercise and what guidance one will accept. The really unfree
system is not the system without guidance and direction, but
the system which deprives the individual of this basic liberty
of choice.

Such a system, imposed on a population in which the urge
to decide things for themselves is not too deeply ingrained, and
managed with the greatest skill, might produce the illusion of
liberty (in the sense of action in accordance with one’s nature)
not by leaving action free but by regimenting human nature
to conformity, from childhood up. Where the leaders of such
a system would ultimately come from remains a problem; un-
less all real leadership were relegated to an infallible tradition
or “ideology,” set up by the original founder or founders. And
how long this could endure is another problem — to which, let
us hope, this country will never have occasion to discover for
itself the answer.

To escape this suicide of liberty requires a people with a sane
balance in their natures. They must have enough of the urge
to independent decision to reject complete regimentation. But
they must have enough underlying like-mindedness to make
most of them accept, without formal coercion, fundamental
ideas and moral codes calling for action in harmony with the
interests of the community. This is the indispensable moral
basis of liberty, no less in the economic than in other realms.

A recalcitrant minority will always have to be coerced; and
the majority will necessarily be subject to direction in many
things which require more definite conformity than mere moral

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codes will bring about, and in which they will accept direction,
not because they would voluntarily choose to act in the particu-
lar way the authorities decide on, but because they are intelli-
gently law-abiding and recognize the need for this kind of
conformity. If the controls go beyond what this law-abiding
spirit will voluntarily support, then there is trouble ahead. To
repeat, the question is not whether there is specific direction,
but whether the sphere of liberty that remains is adequate.

III. WARTIME AND PEACETIME ECONOMIES

Normally, a fairly sharp distinction can be drawn between
the peacetime economy and the wartime economy, the latter
being, in democratic countries, ordinarily a temporary interlude.
In wartime, the advantages of the free economy are to a large
extent in abeyance, for several reasons. In the first place, in
wartime the dominant purpose of the economy is no longer to
give individuals as much as possible of the means to liberal
individual living, but to concentrate as much as possible of the
country’s resources on a single national end: the winning of the
war. Any unnecessary surplus for individual citizens becomes,
temporarily, an undesirable thing. In the second place, the
wastes and fumblings of the market’s trial-and-error methods
become inappropriate as compared to the method of centralized
statistical canvassing of resources and needs. And in the third
place, the shortages of essential materials and of labor and
resources for essential purposes are such that the unchecked
forces of supply and demand would raise prices and rewards
far beyond the level that is necessary for the most effective
stimulus to the needed mobilizations. If increases in prices are
limited short of the level that would equate supply and de-
mand, rationing of scarce supplies and resources becomes neces-
sary and is tolerated as a temporary emergency measure.

The peacetime “war against depression” is sometimes spoken
of as if the same general kinds of measures would be appropri-
ate to it. But it seems on the whole more nearly true that the
essential conditions are here reversed. In wartime, the effective
demand for goods and services is excessive ; in depressions, it is

JOHN M. CLARK 3 1 7

deficient. In wartime, more than adequate purchasing power
is forthcoming via deficit-financing and credit expansion, with
no serious effects on business confidence. In depressions the
reverse is the case 5 business confidence is weakened to start with,
and deficit-financing beyond moderate limits serves to make
the situation worse. In wartime, the economic energizing forces
are superabundant, and it is a question of directing them into
the most essential channels and restricting their action in other
directions. In depressions, the basic problem is a partial paralysis
of the energizing forces. For all these reasons (which could be
much elaborated) it appears that the same measures will not
work in the same way in the two situations. The peacetime econ-
omy requires a fuller measure of liberty, unless the whole sys-
tem is to be revolutionized.

IV. LIBERTY IN THE INDIVIDUALISTIC SCHEME

It is perhaps not necessary to sum up systematically the place
and forms of liberty in the individualistic scheme of theory and
practice. Among economists, at least, the emphasis shifted early
in the nineteenth century from liberty as an inherent “natural
right” to liberty as an instrument of economic plenty. There is
much to be said for the contention that liberty of some sort is
a natural right in the sense that it is such a vital need of human-
ity that it cannot be denied without serious or even disastrous
social consequences. But while this means that everyone should
have liberty of some sort, it does not necessarily mean that they
must have economic liberty (though it creates a strong pre-
sumption, the economic realm being so important). And it cer-
tainly does not in itself mean that there should be the precise
variety of economic liberties that has constituted the historic
system of individualism.

In this system, freedom was an instrument for the production
of plenty, and the plenty was to be distributed on the basis of
freedom for each to get as much as his services, or those of
his property, were worth in the market in some economic em-
ployment. A wide distribution of the plenty was desired, but
economists were not always too hopeful as to the possibility of

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318

freeing the masses of humanity from the burden of poverty,
under either individualistic or socialistic systems*

The individualistic system was based on freedom of con-
sumers to choose among products and among competing pro-
ducers of any one product. Everyone was free to attempt what
only a limited number could succeed in: namely, the working
out of improved methods of producing goods or the develop-
ment of new products 3 or was free to imitate the pioneers and
compete with them (except as limited by patent rights). And
all were free to secure the co-operation of labor and capital
by individual bargaining in a free market, whereby each would
get as much as the market could afford* Access to all occupations
was to be similarly free. Parties were bound by contracts they
had made, but the contracts were free, and contracts unduly
limiting liberty for the future were not enforced.

The system was one of voluntary co-operation, which the
co-operators were free to withhold at any time (except for the
performance of existing contracts). This freedom to withhold
was the basis of their power to bargain for the price of their
co-operation. The fact that if they held their resources idle they
lost all income from them was the only compulsion laid upon
them to co-operate with someone or other and not to let their
resources lie idle. Aside from this compulsion, they were free
to produce what they chose, or not to produce 5 to work for
whom they chose or not to work; to buy from whom they
chose or not to buy, at a particular time or ever. 1

This freedom not to co-operate seems to be an inseparable
part of the freedom to choose with whom one will co-operate,
and the manner of one’s co-operation, and to bargain for re-
muneration. The State can hardly order people to co-operate
without assuming considerable responsibility for the manner
and matter of the co-operation, and thus, in effect, introducing
the essentials of a socialistic system. Yet this freedom is clearly
dangerous; and any widespread failure to co-operate, or with-
holding of co-operation, can produce serious industrial paralysis.
Therefore this form of freedom is no longer a purely private

1 This is, of course, qualified in the case of public service industries by a
positive obligation to render service.

JOHN M. CLARK 319

affair, but has become a matter of vital and recognized public
interest.

Employers can be trusted not to suspend operations as soon
as profits become unsatisfactory 5 they are under economic pres-
sure to continue operating so long as they can cover actual cur-
rent operating expenses. And the more stably established among
them are under pressure to go further and to operate at a loss,
so long as financially practicable and so long as recovery is in
prospect, rather than disband their working organization. These
pressures are strengthened by a growing sense of public obliga-
tion to maintain employment. But the employers are also under
pressure to avoid bankruptcy or unduly heavy losses. And as
the price system operates, a moderate decline in demand often
takes effect more largely in a decline of output than in a radical
reduction of prices such as might result from a resolute attempt
to maintain full production and employment at all costs. Thus,
despite strong pressures to maintain operation, the liberty not
to co-operate remains an important factor.

Central features in this problem are the timing of purchases
of durable consumers 5 goods, such as houses and automobiles,
and of the installation of durable productive equipment. We
are learning the explosive possibilities of irregular timing in
these matters ; yet the State can hardly step in and prescribe
regular timing by public fiat without destroying the basis of
the voluntary economic system. If it is to work toward this end,
it must do so by indirection, acting on the causes of the irregu-
lar timing; and the manner of doing this represents no easy
problem, especially as the economists have not yet reached cer-
tainty as to some of the fundamental causes at work.

Yet the cumulative result of this freedom to withhold eco-
nomic co-operation is at times to deprive millions of the oppor-
tunity, and in effect of the liberty, to earn a living, and to
reduce them to dependence — -which also undermines the basis
of the free economic system. And this appears to constitute the
central dilemma of economic liberty at the present time.

Or perhaps it shares this position with the problem of the
effects of war which, if it becomes chronic, also threatens to
destroy the system of liberty in all its forms. Indeed, the pe-

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320

culiar weight of the great depression of the early thirties is
undoubtedly in large measure due to the aftermath of the
World War, with its redrawing of frontiers regardless of areas
of economic interdependence, coupled with an exaggerated na-
tionalism and aggravated trade barriers which enable all na-
tional frontiers to do as much economic harm as possible.

But it will not do to dismiss the question by blaming all our
present economic troubles on the World War. Before the War
came, Americans deplored the chronic underemployment which
some of the older countries suffered and felt that their own
economy was of a more healthy sort, free from this ailment of
the effete systems of Europe (though admittedly suffering from
periodic crises). Now it seems more probable that the difference
lay mainly in our comparative youth and the greater maturity
of large-scale industrialism in the older economies of Europe;
and that we have now become mature enough to share the dif-
ficulties of the older countries. Certain it is that since 1929 we
have had no reason to feel superior in the matter of depressions
and unemployment.

Neither will it do to blame all our troubles on the principle
of individualism. One answer to this is like the proverbial an-
swer to the claim that Christianity has failed — namely, that it
has not been tried. The individualistic principle has not been
consistently followed. The aggravation of our troubles is at
least in some considerable part due to just the sort of restric-
tions on free competition, and obstacles to free movement,
against which Adam Smith directed his heaviest artillery. This
includes not only barriers to free international intercourse, but
a host of internal restrictions on free competitive bargaining.
Trade unions set a standard wage and maintain it in the face
of the fact that industry will not and cannot employ all their
members at that wage level. Industrial producers do something
similar with prices. Both are, quite understandably, protecting
themselves against what would otherwise be competition of a
ruthless and cutthroat sort.

Moreover, it is more than doubtful whether, for example,
an indiscriminate slash in wages would be a useful measure of
recovery in any and all situations of depression. The problem

JOHN M. CLARK 321

is not as simple as that. For wages constitute not only a major
part of the cost of producing goods, but also a major part of
the purchasing power on which the demand for goods depends.
Hence the effect of an indiscriminate reduction in wages and
prices might largely cancel out. When we learn more about
these interrelationships, we may find that wage reductions are
of relatively little use as recovery measures in industries and
trades that serve consumers directly, while in those that serve
producers, such measures may be fully effective only in con-
nection with other measures of a more positive sort.

Without the present protections against unlimited cuts in
wages and prices we should still have depressions; of that there
can be little doubt. But they would be different in character.
They might be sharper, shorter, and sooner mended — more like
the depression of 1920-21 than like the prolonged prostration
of the thirties. It is quite likely that our attempted defenses
have made things worse. We have kept the principle of ulti-
mate freedom not to produce, while the antidotes — the counter-
acting competitive compulsions — have been seriously weakened.
But any attempt to reverse this tendency faces enormous diffi-
culties and is beset by doubts. We do not seem to have either the
necessary certainty or the necessary ruthlessness. We shall prob-
ably have to shape our course on the assumption that this con-
dition will not be radically transformed in the near future.

Under such conditions, what can we hope to do, within the
framework of the free economic system? We can attempt to fill
the gap in private spending for consumption and investment by
public deficit-spending. This can have some effect in mitigating
industrial fluctuations of moderate extent and duration, if well
planned and timed, and placed on a basis which does not create
distrust and fear of endlessly accumulating public deficits. But
now, in 1939, we appear to have passed the limits of usefulness
of this policy. It cannot successfully combat a state of chronic
partial stagnation. Or we can hope to manage a social security
program in such a way that it will not only help the victims of
depression with a maximum of preservation of self-respect and
a minimum of “pauperization” and demoralization, but will

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322

also have some stabilizing effect via the steadying of the flow of
purchasing power.

For the longer future, we can work toward voluntary mutual
arrangements between different industrial groups for the partial
stabilization of investment spending, in which all have a com-
mon interest. This is probably a matter for generations of edu-
cation, experimentation, and difficult adjustment, and at best it
can hardly hope to achieve perfect success. In short, under the
free system we may hope to mitigate the severity of economic
stagnations, especially if we can establish a sound basis for in-
ternational peace, and to cushion their incidence on the chief
victims, but hardiy to cure them completely. Ultimately, a lib-
eral cannot help believing that the organized common sense of
humanity, and the common interest in uninterrupted produc-
tion, will succeed in reducing the evil of depressions to propor-
tions which will not be seriously harmful. But some burden of
this sort appears to be a part of the price we pay for the system
of economic freedom. And many are asking seriously whether
it is worth the price ; while many have already decided that it
is not.

V. ECONOMIC FREEDOM UNDER SOCIALISM

A socialistic system might develop less productive power than
the individualistic system, but it would be likely to utilize far
more completely such productive power as it did develop and
to afford practically complete opportunity for everyone to get
a job. On this basis alone, many would rate it above the indi-
vidualistic system on a scale of human liberty. This naturally
involves the assumption that socialistic systems need not neces-
sarily follow the Russian model, but may be democratic, and as
hospitable to personal freedom as their essential nature permits.
In such a matter we can, of course, deal only with probabilities,
not certainties.

As already remarked, under socialism, consumers would pre-
sumably continue to exercise free choice among products offered
for sale, though within narrower limits as to amounts and as-
sortments of goods available and presumably as to the time of

JOHN M. CLARK 323

delivery, especially in the case of durable goods. And workers
would presumably have considerable freedom of selection
among occupations, within a range somewhat more limited and
standardized than at present. The question what goods should
be produced would be affected by the consumers’ choices as
expressed in the market, but with a difference, since the deter-
mination what wants should be satisfied, and what not, would
in the last analysis rest with a governing bureaucracy, modified
by whatever democratic machinery might be set up for deter-
mining general policies. It is here that the great difference
would lie — always provided the State did not prescribe the
personal, cultural, and intellectual activities of the people as
the Russian State does at present. Into the probabilities bear-
ing on this question we may inquire in a moment. The chief
liberty that is sure to be given up is what we know as business
liberty 3 and the question is whether this particular form of
liberty is important enough to be kept, at the price we have to
pay for it.

VI. THE choice: how important is business

LIBERTY?

Considering how heavy this price is, it is not too easy for an
impartial observer, accustomed to the principle that the welfare
of the greatest number weighs most heavily in the social scales,
to justify a decision to keep the continuity of development,
building on the core of the existing system, and to work for
betterment within these limitations. There are many reasons for
such a decision, which actuate many persons, that will not stand
the test of critical scrutiny.

One such reason is the fact that many persons who now are
prosperous, and able to live lives of much freedom and gen-
erous proportions, would be less prosperous and more limited
under a socialistic system. When weighed against the present
lot of the unemployed, this reason appears to rest on a badly
warped scale of values. If it is to be defended, it must be not
on the ground of the enjoyments or welfare of the fortunate
groups taken by themselves, but on the ground that it is in-

FREEDOM

3^4

dispensable to society that there should be as many as possible
who are able to live really generous lives and to be free to
cultivate the interests and capacities that go with them, even
if there is not enough to give everyone this privilege, and even
if many of those who enjoy it put their advantages to futile or
unworthy uses, in the exercise of the same liberty that leads
the best among them to make invaluable contributions to soci-
ety, of a sort that no bureaucracy would accomplish. On the
other hand, it is not safe to take for granted that the creative
leaders of a socialistic system would be penuriously paid, though
they would not be in a position, out of their private funds, to
endow expensive enterprises of social pioneering. This last is
a really important matter, from the standpoint of free social
experimentation. But on the whole, while the argument has
important force, it does not seem sufficient: this reason for re-
taining business liberty is not as bad as many radicals think, but
it is not good enough.

Another argument is that the selection of industrial leaders
and directors would be on a basis which would afford a less
rigorous test of efficiency in doing the job, and especially a less
rigorous weeding-out of the less obvious grades of inefficiency,
which could not be proved by bureaucratic records of perform-
ance. The force of this argument is necessarily conjectural. The
existing system is far from perfect on the score of efficiency.
Tendencies to nepotism and bureaucracy exist, but they are
under a pretty severe check ; more so than bureaucratic tend-
encies in government. It is possible that a socialist dictatorship
might be ruthlessly efficient, though the element of ruthless-
ness would itself involve a very considerable sacrifice of the
possibility of the higher and more creative forms of efficiency.
But there seems no point in discussing such a system in a study
the main concern of which is liberty. And democratic socialism
would presumably involve a considerable sacrifice of efficiency,
possibly more than would be involved in periodic moderate de-
pressions. This argument has force ; nevertheless it does not
seem quite good enough.

More serious, perhaps, than a loss of efficiency in the current
work of production is the cumulative effect over generations of

JOHN M. CLARK 32 5

a slowing-down of the rate of technical progress; and this also
might be expected under a socialist system. Yet it is not likely
that progress would stop ; and there is much evidence that our
present speed of technical advance is greater than we can suc-
cessfully assimilate, and that we might be better off if the rate
slowed down somewhat. This argument for preserving business
liberty is a good one; but there is still room to doubt whether
it is good enough.

Another argument is that one of the primary objectives of
socialism, namely, the abolition of class inequalities, would turn
out to be an illusion, and that the result would simply be to
set up new class divisions, with a fresh starting point and an
altered basis of selection. To speak in unduly simple terms, a
bureaucracy would replace a “plutocracy.” A socialist might
grant this point fully and still hold that the most decisive ele-
ment in the case for socialism is not affected. This argument also
seems hardly good enough.

What would be the effect of a socialist system on those forms
of freedom which are properly designated as “personal liberty”?
Is there any reason why personal liberty, as distinct from busi-
ness liberty, should not be as unrestricted under socialism as
under the present system, or more so? I believe that there is;
and the reason centers upon the coercive potentialities of a cen-
tral administrative authority which has ultimate power over the
livelihood of every citizen. This is a power of which we in this
country have no direct knowledge, though elsewhere people
have learned its meaning by bitter experience.

Advocates of the looser federative forms of socialism might
deny the necessity for such a central authority; but without it
there is no clear way of settling the terms of interchange
between the industrial units that would be set up. Each can
hardly be sovereign; there must be an ultimate sovereign
power over them. And this power must be predominantly of an
administrative character; and the policy- forming decisions which
might be made by a democratic (or nominally democratic)
legislative authority would, even more than in our present sys-
tem, have to be applied to such complicated situations that con-
tinuous and detailed democratic scrutiny would be even more

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326

impossible than with ns at present. Hence these policies would
be extremely dependent on the administrative organization for
their concrete interpretation and embodiment in action. And the
administrative organization would include— how much? In a
real sense, it would have no limit, short of every citizen. What
would be the tendencies of an organization with such possibili-
ties of power?

The probability is that the system would start with a require-
ment of universal espousal of some officially formulated “ide-
ology” — perhaps the Gospel according to. Karl Marx, as ex-
pounded and interpreted by an infallible priesthood. But for
the sake of argument, let us pass this by. Aside from this, what
would be the natural tendencies of such an organization? A
naturally defensible principle would be to permit criticism of
the performance of the administration in the carrying out of
the fundamental purposes of the system, but to suppress attacks
on these fundamental purposes. If a more liberal principle were
formally adopted, one can hardly imagine it being carried into
effect, by an administration of the character this one would
necessarily have. But who is to decide where criticism of per-
formance ends and attacks on fundamental principles begin?
The real power would rest with the administration itself.

Some offenses and penalties might be in the hands of a
judiciary, and the judiciary might be theoretically independent,
though it is hard to see how this independence could be a work-
ing reality under such a system. But the administration would
not be dependent on judicial penalties. It has the most irresist-
ibly powerful system of rewards and penalties in its hands al-
ready, in its power over occupational opportunity. If American
political administrations held such power, how long would it
be before an administration would come into office which could
not resist the temptation to exercise it, and to construe faithful-
ness to the administration as an indispensable test of fitness to
hold the positions it had in its gift? (Note that under socialism
this means all the real jobs in the country.) And after that
happened, how long would it be before the formal guaranties
of liberty would cease to be of any effect?

A radical nonconformist often has difficulty under our pres-

JOHN M. CLARK 327

ent system in keeping his job or in getting another of similar
quality; and this is a serious matter. How much more serious
would it be if there were, in the last analysis, only one em-
ployer? The sad imperfections of personal liberty as we have
it are often used as arguments by socialists. Yet they seem to be
the poorest of reasons for adopting a system under which such
avenues of escape as now exist would be cut off, and such liberty
as we now have extinguished. “Disciplinary jobs” have already
been mentioned, but the term conveys no faint impression of
what such discipline could amount to. It has the power to rob
martyrdom of its dignity and to reduce it to bald sordidness
and the breaking-down of personality itself.

In short, it seems that the existence of genuinely independent
employers, with some one of whom the nonconformist can find
employment, is not merely a matter of business liberty, but is
one of the indispensable safeguards of true personal liberty.
And this may be the one really adequate reason for refusing
to make the irrevocable shift to socialism, despite the admitted
and ominous defects of the system we have.

One word in closing, by way of safeguard against a possible
misapprehension. This argument should not be taken as a brief
for “preserving the existing system.” That is a straw man. Ex-
isting systems are not preserved unchanged, no matter what we
decide about them. They change of themselves, if they are not
altered by outside forces; and our present system is not exempt
from this law. No single form of existing business liberty is
sacred. But this argument is a brief for continuing to struggle
onward with a system embodying the principle of liberty, eco-
nomic as well as personal, in spite of the difficulties. This does
not offer a quick cure of basic evils. It offers rather a prospect
of generations of effort, with patience, persistence, and toler-
ance, to strike a sane balance between liberty and control, and
to reduce our worst evil to tolerable proportions by a process
of adjustment subject to free discussion, not by arbitrary fiat
and suppression of dissent.

Since such a course cannot quickly cure the evil of unem-
ployment, we shall have to pay a deal of attention to ways of
mitigating the more disastrous burdens it throws on individuals

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328

and groups. This is a palliative, perhaps, but a necessary one,
while we are working toward the larger goal. In this latter
process, public functions will inevitably increase, and business
will inevitably have to surrender to collective planning and
direction (though not necessarily to that of “political” govern-
ment) some of the liberties that now remain to it. This would
be true, even if political government were to abandon the de-
tails of this task to business itself, retaining only general lead-
ership and power of stimulation and ultimate veto.

It is conceivable that at some point in such a process we might
achieve enough co-ordination to reduce unemployment to tol-
erable proportions without making everyone an employee of
the State. At that point, it would make little difference whether
we called the system “socialistic” or not. “Socialism” of such a
sort, reached by such a process, could still leave room for true
personal liberty 5 it could still be democratic. But this can only
be attained by a process that does not go too fast for business
to adjust itself without catastrophic breakdown or violent rev-
olution. If such a process is to continue, we must avoid commit-
ting ourselves to the experiment that would mean the end of
free experimentation.

Gaetano Salvemini

Lauro de Bosh Lecturer in the History of Italian Civilization ,
Harvard University

DEMOCRACY RECONSIDERED

l “democracy” and “liberty”

T HE word “democracy” is used to indicate several in-
terrelated but different concepts:

i. The lower strata of society, the common people,
the “masses” as distinct from the “classes.” We say that the
middle classes occupy the space between aristocracy and democ-
racy ; that it is idle to harbor illusions on the wisdom of democ-
racy 5 that democracy can be more warlike than an aristocracy.

2. That doctrine which the English call “liberalism” and
which upholds the rights of the lower classes against the politi-
cal and economic privileges of the upper classes. We say that
democracy implies equal political rights for all citizens 5 that
democracy teaches that there must be no hereditary privileges;
that it is impossible to conciliate democracy with imperialistic
practices.

3. Those political parties that hoist the democratic doctrine
as their banner and claim to uphold the rights of the lower
classes. We say that British democracy was defeated in the
national election of 1931 ; that a resolution was adopted in its
national convention by the democracy of a given country; that
a given democracy should join hands with other democracies.

4. The institutions which conform to the democratic doc-
trine. We say that French democracy does not grant the fran-
chise to women; that democracy cannot work in time of war;

329

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33 °

that in the North American democracy there is a Supreme
Court.

5. A country endowed with democratic institutions or its gov-
ernment, irrespective of whether democratic or antidemocratic
parties are in power. We say that the Western democracies tried
to appease Hitler by the Munich Pact 3 that in 1939 war broke
out between dictatorial Germany and the Western democracies;
that democracies cannot survive unless they show greater effi-
ciency than the dictatorial countries.

6. The whole of the personal and political rights which a
democratic constitution grants the citizens. We say that democ-
racy vanishes if freedom of speech is abolished; that there is no
use talking democracy if freedom of the press is curtailed; that
without democracy there is no respect for human dignity.

7. Not all, but one of those rights that are granted by a
democratic constitution. We say that freedom of speech is de-
mocracy; that universal suffrage is democracy; that a parlia-
mentary form of government is democracy.

8. Those institutions or conditions which would prevail if
the democratic doctrine were consistently carried out. We say
that democracy is a most hopeful way of life; that democracy
grants the same rights to men and women, to colored and
white; that democracy, according to Mazzini, is progress of all
through all under the leadership of the best.

Not seldom it proves difficult to define with precision what
idea one has in mind when the word democracy — or some other
equivalent expression — is used. We hear it said that democracy
is in a state of decadence. But it is not clear whether we should
understand that the masses have fallen into less satisfactory
economic and political conditions, or that the exponents of the
democratic doctrine have become fewer in number, or that the
democratic parties are losing ground either as a result of their
own errors or because the democratic doctrines have been dis-
credited, or that democratic institutions have been wholly or
only partly superseded by institutions not in conformity with
the democratic doctrine. We read in the book of an English
writer, who, however, was a man of great intelligence: “It has
sometimes been held that democracy (a) would be no less

GAETANO SALVEMINI 33 I

hostile to personal liberty than other forms of government. It
is true that the masses (b) may be as antagonistic to personal
independence as the classes. But if it is argued that the demo-
cratic principle (c) can be hostile to liberty this is a fallacy, for
it is full publicity and free discussion that are the organs of
democratic government (d) and if it suppresses them democ-
racy (e) deprives itself of the means of forming a judgment of
its own affairs.” In this text the word democracy is used in case
(a) as equivalent to the democratic form of government or
democratic institutions; in (b) the masses supplant democratic
institutions; in case (c) the democratic doctrine takes the place
of democratic institutions and the masses; in case (d) demo-
cratic government is what it ought to be if it corresponded faith-
fully to democratic doctrine; and in case (e) the masses again
take the upper hand.

All these ambiguities are increased by the fact that the word
democracy, like all other abstract collective words (Nation,
State, Church, Fatherland, Army, Parliament, Party, Capital-
ism, Proletariat), is easily subjected to poetic sublimation and
is endowed with a soul, a genius, a heart, and many other
organs which serve us poor mortals. “Democracy” stirs up the
masses, directs its parties in the political struggle; it is born, it
grows, it weakens, falls ill, runs the risk of dying, or actually
dies as would a person of flesh and blood. Many controversies
on democracy are nothing but senseless squabblings over a
mythological and nonexistent being.

Finally, it is necessary to bear in mind that the word democ-
racy is used also to indicate doctrines and activities diametrically
opposed to one of the essential institutions of a democratic
regime, that is to say, the right of self-government. Thus do we
hear of a so-called Christian Democracy which, according to
The Catholic Encyclopedia, has for its aim “to comfort and
uplift the lower classes excluding expressly every appearance
and implication of political meaning”; this democracy already
existed in the time of Constantine when the clergy “began the
practical work of Christian democracy” by establishing hospices
for orphans, the aged, the infirm, and wayfarers. The Fascists,
the Nazis, and the Communists also often and readily dub as

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332

democracy, nay more, as the “real,” “true,” “full,” “substan-
tial,” “more honest” democracy the political regimes of present-
day Italy, Germany, and Russia, because these regimes also pro-
fess to comfort and uplift the lower classes after having de-
prived them of the very political rights without which it is
not possible to conceive of “government by the people.”

The word “liberty” also labors under the disease of manifold
meanings* Philosophers have spun a tremendous web of con-
fusion around it. But we have no need of venturing on that
tempestuous sea. We shall deal with the word as it has been
used in the political idiom. Already in the eighteenth century
Montesquieu observed that “there is no word that admits of
more varied meanings, and has made more different impres-
sions on the human mind, than that of Liberty.”

Some have taken it for the faculty of deposing a person on whom
they had conferred tyrannical authority; others for the power of
choosing a superior whom they are obliged to obey; others for the
right of bearing arms and of being enabled therefore to use violence;
others, in fine, for the privilege of being governed by a native of their
own country or by their own laws. A certain nation thought for a
long time that liberty consisted in the privilege of wearing long
beards. Some have annexed this name to one form of government
exclusive of others; those who had republican tastes applied it to this
species of policy; those who had enjoyed a monarchical government
gave it to monarchy. Thus they have all applied the name of liberty
to the government best suited to their own customs and inclinations.

Montesquieu mentioned some of these meanings merely to
introduce into his treatise, according to his custom, relief spots
for the benefit of the reader. For our purpose, it will suffice
to notice that the word is taken to mean:

1. The whole of the personal and political rights which a
citizen enjoys under a free constitution. This meaning is analo-
gous to that of democracy under number 6 .

2. Any one of those rights, as if the whole of those rights
were lost if a single one of them were discarded or curtailed.
We term liberty the right of self-government, which Montes-
quieu termed “power of choosing a superior whom they are
obliged to obey”* this “power of a civil society or state to gov-

GAETANO SALVEMINI

333

er n itself by its own discretion or by laws of its own making”
Richard Price called “civil liberty”; and the American Declara-
tion of 1774 stated that “the foundation of English liberty, and
of all free governments, is a right in the people to participate
in their legislative council.”

3. National independence or self-determination, i.e,, what
Montesquieu defined as “the privilege of being governed by a
native of their own country or by their own laws.” We say
that Italy and Germany gained their liberty during the nine-
teenth century.

Moreover, liberty no less than democracy is subject to a
poetical-mythological transfiguration and in the hands of poli-
ticians not seldom is made to mean the opposite of what any
honest man thinks when he uses the word. Thus Hitler and
Mussolini maintain that they are endeavoring to gain liberty
for their nations in international competition and that whoever
hampers their nations in the conquest of their “living space”
commits a crime against their liberty; in this case liberty be-
comes what Montesquieu described as “the right of bearing
arms and of being enabled therefore to use violence.”

In the title of the present paper “democracy” means “demo-
cratic doctrine” and in the pages which follow the reader will
never find the words “democracy” or “liberty” transfigured or
adulterated, and all confusion will be avoided between the vari-
ous concepts which the words evoke.

II. DEMOCRATIC AND OLIGARCHIC INSTITUTIONS

A democratic constitution grants equal rights to all citizens
without discrimination of social class, creed, race, sex, or politi-
cal affiliation.

Such rights fall into two categories:

1. Personal rights, that is to say, those rights which pertain
to the members of the commonwealth as private individuals
and which the French Constituent Assembly of 1789 termed
“the rights of man”: the right to physical integrity and liberty
and to be secure in one’s house, papers, and effects, against un-
reasonable searches and seizures; the right to choose and follow

FREEDOM

334

one’s calling and to own and inherit property; the right to
swift trial by impartial courts in accordance with known laws;
freedom of thought and religion; and the right to be educated
according to one’s own abilities.

2. Political rights, that is to say, the rights which pertain to
the individual as a member of the commonwealth and which
the French Constituent Assembly of 1789 termed “the rights
of the citizen”: freedom of speech, of the press, and of associa-
tion; the right to participate in peaceable assemblies; the right
of petition; the right to be admitted to public office according
to one’s talents; the right of representation or self-government,
Le., the right to change the men in power in central and local
governments by the direct means of elections or through one’s
own representatives; and the right of resistance to unconstitu-
tional governmental activities.

A democratic constitution must include “all” personal rights,
“all” political rights, plus equality of rights among “all” citi-
zens, plus the institutions of self-government.

Before the Reform Act of 1832, England possessed a self-
governing Parliament, or a “parliamentary regime” as it is
commonly called, because the House of Commons was vested
with the right to turn out the Cabinet by a vote of no confidence.
But the middle classes, the lower middle classes, and the lower
classes were more or less thoroughly excluded from political
rights, and the low r er classes did not even enjoy full personal
rights. British “liberties” were the privilege of an upper-class
oligarchy. The characteristic feature of the British Constitution
was a restricted franchise. Even after the Reform Act of 1832,
the franchise remained for many years the privilege of a mid-
dle-class oligarchy. The British Constitution was democratized
during the last century by the gradual extension of the franchise
to all classes and by the abolition of traditional privileges, al-
though it still retains vestiges of the old oligarchic system, such
as hereditary royalty and the privileges of the Lords and of
the Established Church.

The constitution of the German Empire before the War of
19x4-18 granted all German citizens all personal rights, a fair
measure of political rights, and even universal suffrage in the

GAETANO SALVEMXNI

335

election of the Imperial Reichstag. None the less, the Empire
did not have a democratic constitution. It was a federation of
local States in which all classes did not share equally in the
right of representation and whose executives did not depend
upon the votes of the parliaments (Land ta gen). The electorate
had only the right to make their opinions known through their
representatives while the Cabinets could to a large extent dis-
regard those opinions. Thus the States forming the Imperial
Federation had an oligarchic and not a democratic franchise
and had representative but not self-governing parliaments. The
Imperial Reichstag itself, though elected by universal suffrage,
did not have the power to unseat the Chancellor by a vote of no
confidence. It was a representative but not a self-governing
institution. Moreover, legislation passed by the Reichstag needed
the approval of an Upper House (Bundesrath) composed of
delegates appointed by the executives of the various oligarchic
and not self-governing local States. As a consequence, the con-
stitution of the German Empire was oligarchic although it
embodied universal suffrage, which is one of the indispensable
features of a democratic constitution. Universal suffrage alone
does not make a constitution democratic.

A parliamentary or self-governing regime may be either oli-
garchic or democratic. A democratic regime, besides granting
equality of personal and political rights, must be parliamentary
or self-governing.

In a self-governing regime the majority rules. The consent
of the majority, however, does not suffice to bring a political
constitution within the framework of democratic doctrine.

When the democratic movements originated, they aimed at
establishing the rights of the lower-class majority against the
privileges of the clergy and the nobility. After the abolition of
the political privileges of these minorities a new peril arose : ma-
jorities might suppress the liberties of minorities. The demo-
cratic doctrine consequently became more complex. It came to
imply not only the principle that the right to rule is vested in
the majority but also the principle that the right to disagree with
the majority is vested in the minority. Political liberty is funda-
mentally “the right to differ.” From this right to disagree

FREEDOM

33 6

spring all other political rights of the citizen in a democratic
regime. These rights are meant not so much to establish the
power of the majority as to protect the minorities in their right
of opposition. The best test of the standards of a democratic
constitution is the provisions it makes for the protection of
minorities.

Thus, a democratic constitution must include not only per-
sonal rights, political rights, and juridical equality, but respect
for the personal and political rights of the minorities.

We have spoken of the rights vested in the “majority” and
“minorities” by democratic institutions. This terminology does
not correspond to realities and should be discarded.

In all societies, political control — that is to say, administra-
tive, military, legislative, economic, religious, moral, and intel-
lectual leadership — is in the hands of an “organized minority,”
while the disorganized majority conforms more or less willingly
to the commands of the minority. Mosca termed “political
class” the minority controlling a given society at a given time.
This “political class” has nothing to do with a “social class”
in the Marxian sense of the term. It means the network of
managers, high officials, and influential persons who, in a given
society, control public bodies and private organizations. Such
leaders are not necessarily drawn from one single class even
though the upper strata of society do furnish the majority.
Elements from the lower social classes are admitted into the
s ruling class in varying proportions.

When the political class splits up into conflicting sections,
each of which brandishes a formula of its own, one then has
“parties.” Under a democratic form of government there are
parties which maintain that the existing social order cannot be
altered without impairing the welfare of those very lower
classes which bear the weight of the entire structure. Other
parties claim the monopoly of upholding the rights of the
underprivileged majority against the privileges of the upper-
class oligarchy. As a matter of fact, the latter, no less than the
former, are “organized minorities” striving for predominance.
Nor does their victory always bring about an increase in the

GAETANO SALVEMINI 337

welfare of that majority, although victory always does bring
about an increase in the welfare of any victorious minority.

Even in the most radically democratic regime the govern-
ment is not run by the majority of the citizens. It is run by that
party which, for the time being, is upheld by the votes of the
majority. And this is the majority not of the citizens but of
that single section of citizens sufficiently interested in politics to
vote on election day. All parties are organized minorities that
try to gain the support of the majority of the electorate, and
this majority of the electorate, in its turn, is as a rule only a
minority of the entire population.

We may carry even further our analysis of the minorities
which compete for the right to rule. The victorious minority is
composed of two parts: (i) a permanently organized machine,
bossed by ward heelers, that votes solidly for the party regard-
less of circumstances ; and (2) a flying squadron of unattached
voters who are not members of any party, whose actions are
unpredictable and who determine victory by voting now for this
party and now for another. When the difference in voting
strength between the permanent forces of the conflicting parties
is not great, the victory is due to that fluctuating minority
which is not regimented in any party and which may even be
extremely small in numbers.

De jure , a dictatorial regime is the rule of an autocrat, an
oligarchic regime is the rule of a privileged minority, and a
democratic regime is the rule of the majority of the citizens.
De facto , all political regimes are ruled by organized minorities.
The autocrat could not govern millions of men if he were not
surrounded by intimate advisers, party leaders, and high civil
and military servants, under whom a hierarchy of minor serv-
ants assists the upper stratum of the governing class in control-
ling the subjects. Intimate advisers, party leaders, high civil
and military servants, and minor servants have de jure no
authority whatsoever. Sovereignty — that is, the right to make
decisions and give orders — is lodged in the autocrat alone. De
factOy the autocrat makes such decisions and issues such orders
in accordance with the suggestions of the men with whom he is
in touch, and the lower strata of the governing class also share

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338

to a certain extent in the authority of the higher-ups. All gov-
ernments are governments by minorities. A democratic regime,
no less than any other regime, is ruled by minority. And within
the organized minorities or parties contending for power, there
are more or less clandestine coteries that pull the strings behind
the scenes. Government by majority has never existed nor is it
likely ever to exist. Hence it would be correct never to speak
of “majority” or “minority,” but rather of “party in power”
and “opposition parties.”

What, then, is the difference between an autocratic regime,
an oligarchic regime, and a democratic regime if all three are
government by minorities?

In a dictatorial regime the minority that surrounds the dic-
tator, and in an oligarchic regime the ruling minority, possess
the monopoly of power by their own rights and have no legal
responsibility towards the common herd. A democratic regime
is an open field for free competition among all organized mi-
norities or “parties” aspiring to run the government. In order
to gain power or to remain in power, each minority seeks the
support of the greatest possible number of citizens. All citizens,
and not one class of the population alone, are entitled by uni-
versal suffrage to take part in competition if they choose to do
so. Thus any section of the disorganized majority can, from
time to time, give vent to its grievances and, under the leader-
ship of one of the organized minorities of the opposition, over-
throw the organized minority in power.

The existence of competing parties is essential to the work-
ing of democratic institutions. As Sir Herbert Samuel, one of
the British Liberal leaders, has explained it, men and women
of the same mind must have some method of acting together
for their common purposes.

Otherwise an electorate is merely a mob. Some one must frame
policies, choose candidates, carry on propaganda; some one must
watch the actions of the elected members; some one must mould
and develop the political activities of the future. In the legislature,
members supporting the same principles must work steadily together;
otherwise a parliament becomes nothing more than a collection of
shifting groups of individuals, and the system of representation breaks

GAETANO SALVE MINI

339

clown through its own ineffectiveness. All this can be done only by
political parties. Where parties are insufficiently developed, as in
India, the successful working of democratic institutions is doubtful.
Where they are suppressed as in Germany, Italy and Russia, democ-
racy is destroyed . 1

III. DICTATORIAL INSTITUTIONS

Better to understand the nature of democratic institutions one
has only to observe those institutions which stand in direct
opposition to them, that is, dictatorial institutions.

Under dictatorial institutions one party alone is entitled to
exist. As one Fascist leader in Italy writes: “The old free State
was based on two assumptions: political freedom and the party
system. All parties were lawful and were permitted to exist
under free rule. Today, Fascism has entirely superseded such
doctrines and practices.” It is a familiar joke in Moscow that
there may be any number of political parties in the Soviet
Union, but under one single indispensable condition: that one
party be in power and the others in jail.

All associations whose activities may be regarded as hostile
to the party in power are outlawed. One man — the dictator —
controls the entire machinery of government. The confidence
men of the supreme master control every subordinate depart-
ment of national life. Not only political associations but trade
unions, charitable institutions, athletic clubs, and the like must
be directed by men enjoying the confidence of the men in power.
Daily papers, reviews, and all other agencies of information
must be run by men subservient to the party in power. Books
distasteful to the party in power are either suppressed, confis-
cated, or burned. Judges, public officials, and teachers are dis-
missed from their posts, and professional men are not allowed
to carry on their professions if their political or technical activi-
ties run counter to the dictates of the party in power. Ministers
of all churches must either keep silent on all matters tabooed
by the party in power or join in singing the official anthems if
they do not wish to be silenced or have their congregations dis-

1 Contemporary Review, Vol. CXLVIII (1935)) pp. 263-64.

FREEDOM

340

persed. Elective local government is abolished, and local bodies
are run by appointees of the central government. The executive
in the central government no longer depends on the legislative
power. Parliament is stripped of all real authority. National
elections are either abolished or reduced to a sham so as always
to give a show of unanimous approval to the party in power.
The personal liberty or integrity of the subjects, their property,
the privacy of their homes, the right to choose their professions
or their religion, are placed at the discretion of the men in
power and their police. Actual or potential opponents are not
tried by independent judges but by administrative or military
courts and have no guaranties of a fair trial. In short, not only
political but also personal, rights are discarded.

Before the rise of modern dictators a political regime which
not only excluded political rights but also violated the personal
rights of the subject was termed a “tyranny.” An “absolute,” or
“despotic,” or “autocratic” regime was a regime having a he-
reditary monarch, in which no political rights were granted the
subject but under which his personal rights were protected at
least to a certain extent by fixed laws that not even the sov-
ereign — at least in theory — was entitled to violate. Dictatorship
was that form of government in which the man endowed with
autocratic power was an upstart who had abolished free institu-
tions. The Czar of Russia was an absolute monarch, whereas
Napoleon I and Napoleon III were dictators.

The political institutions of present-day Germany, Italy, and
Russia should be termed “tyrannies,” since not only political
but also personal rights have been discarded. But as a result of
the moral degradation which has spread all over the world
during the last twenty years, the notions of both personal and
political rights have become so obscured in our minds that we
no longer make any distinction between tyranny and dictator-
ship, and as far as Germany, Italy, and Russia are concerned,
we term their political constitutions dictatorships while we
should term them tyrannies.

Dictatorial or tyrannical regimes today are called “fascist.”
The term w r as invented in Italy soon after the War of 1914-18
to connote a political party which claimed to be both anti-

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341

democratic and anticommunist. It spread from Italy to other
countries with the same meaning. Dictatorial or tyrannical re-
gimes which do not abolish private ownership of the means of
production and distribution today are called “fascist” in order
to distinguish them from the dictatorial regime of Soviet
Russia.

There is no doubt that the historical origin and the economic
structure underlying the Communist dictatorship differ from
those upon which are based the Fascist and Nazi dictatorships.
The Communist dictatorship in Russia was set up with the aim
of creating economic equality by abolishing private ownership
of the means of production and of distribution, and it purports
to prevent Russia from reverting to the institutions of capital-
istic society. On the other hand, both the Fascist and Nazi dic-
tatorships claim to have saved Europe from communism and
maintain that their object is to uphold private ownership, though
under increasing governmental supervision. Yet many of the
legislative measures by which Hitler has suppressed democratic
institutions in Germany are the exact counterpart of Italian
Fascist laws. And the latter are but imitations of the laws en-
acted in Russia by the Communist Party. Hitler ought to pay
huge royalties to Mussolini, and Mussolini, in his turn, to
Stalin. Thus if the historical origins and the economic aims
differ, the political institutions are analogous.

Mussolini has christened his dictatorial regime a “totalitarian”
regime. This word has also enjoyed great favor. A totalitarian
regime demands the subject’s total allegiance to one single
authority: that of the dictator and the other subordinate leaders
of the party in power. A democratic regime allows the citizen
to harbor in his heart different loyalties: toward his family, his
parish, his college, his city, his profession, his political party,
his fatherland, and even international institutions, such as the
Catholic Church or the proletarian Internationale. A democratic
regime is not a totalitarian but a pluralistic regime.

Authority, discipline, obedience, are the passwords of dicta-
torial regimes. Self-reliance, discussion, co-operation, are the
passwords of democratic regimes.

342

FREEDOM

IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF DEMOCRACY

Whoever deduces the democratic doctrine from the assump-
tion that “all men are bora equal,” and understands that doc-
trine in the sense that men are born with equal abilities, takes
as a point of departure something which does not exist. The
opponents of the democratic doctrine, institutions, and parties
need to exert very little effort to show that that assumption is
nonsensical, and that since the basis of the construction is absurd,
the entire construction disintegrates.

However, one may interpret that formula not in the sense
that men are born with equal abilities but in the sense that all
men, in a self-defining civilized community, are entitled to the
same personal and political rights and liberties. Thus no longer
does one assert a fact but a moral and juridical principle.

On what basis can this principle rest?

It rests on a fact which is demonstrated by the whole of man’s
experience. Men are bom not with equal abilities, but with an
equal ability to blunder. No person or group of persons pos-
sesses a monopoly on infallibility. There exists no social science
as exact as the physical sciences. Forecasts on social life are
always uncertain. There are lucky politicians and unlucky poli-
ticians. One man just happens to be reaching the door at the
very moment it opens, and he enters without the slightest dif-
ficulty. Another man may knock for years, and it will never
open to him. Sometimes the way out opens up by itself when
the people least expect it and without their having contributed
in any way to the event. Often, a political leader is deemed wise
or foolish merely because he had the good or bad fortune to
be in power at a time when favorable or unfavorable coinci-
dences brought about upgrade or downgrade trends in national
life. The art of government is, to a large extent, a gamble,
because the prediction of social facts is, to a large extent, a
gamble.

From this truth that no one is infallible and that no social
class possesses a monopoly on intelligence or virtue must be
drawn a conclusion to the effect that no social class ought to

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343

be vested with a monopoly on political power. Selfishness is
only too natural to the human heart. If the enjoyment of politi-
cal rights and consequent political power is monopolized by one
section of the population and withheld from the rest, the priv-
ileged section will promote only those measures tending to
increase or preserve its own wealth, influence, or prestige. Any
initiative which might endanger that position will be combated
or allowed to fall. The interests of the sections excluded from
political power will be ignored or trampled under foot. Justice
will be nothing but the interests of the stronger man as long as
it is the stronger man alone who defines Justice. This is why
the democratic doctrine revindicates for all citizens the right
to organize into parties. The party whose leaders inspire the
majority of the electorate with the greatest confidence goes to
power. If this party fails to justify the confidence placed in it,
the electorate puts another party in its place. The various pos-
sible solutions of impending problems are thus tried out one
after the other. By trial and error — “muddling through,” as
the English say — a way out is found.

The- “masses” are neither more nor less infallible than the
“classes.” With all the respect due the memory of Jefferson,
we can no longer allow ourselves to be deluded today by the
idea that if the citizens are permitted free elections they will
generally elect “the really good and wise” and that “a natural
aristocracy” of “virtue and talents” will arise which does not
labor under the drawbacks of “an artificial aristocracy, founded
on wealth and birth.” The wise man of Monticello lived during
a period when human hopes were in the heyday of their youth.
In a.d. 1940, we can no longer repeat that the composite judg-
ment of the masses is superior to the composite judgment of
the few. The composite judgment of a few or many blunderers
is nothing more nor less than the composite blundering of a few
or many blunderers. Democratic doctrine does not need to bind
itself to outlived slogans. It needs only to assume that a work-
ing man may have more horse sense than a millionaire and that
both may blunder to the same degree.

In choosing their representatives the majority of the elector-
ate may be wrong. They may discover soon after turning out

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one party that they have brought into power a party which is
worse than the one that was turned out. In that case the major-
ity of the electorate turns out the incumbent party at the next
election and either returns the first party to power or elects a
third. That is why elections are held from time to time. Recur-
rent elections have been devised for the very purpose of en-
abling the citizens to correct the blunders they may have com-
mitted in former elections. Recurrent elections spring from the
negation of the contention that a people is faultless.

The citizen is not a “sovereign” in the sense that he rules
the country. In a representative democracy, the sovereignty of
the people only means that the citizens have the right to turn
out their rulers when the latter, in the opinion of the majority
of the electorate, have made too many blunders. When he des-
ignates his representatives the citizen merely declares whether
he is satisfied or not with prevailing conditions. If he is satis-
fied, he votes for the party in power.

This is much less majestic than “sovereignty.” But it is still
a right of great importance. The men in power are thus obliged
to be ever on the alert and keep their fingers on the pulse of
popular feeling in order not to be uprooted by some tornado
of discontent. And when vast streams of dissatisfaction have
been created either by the mistakes or the bad luck of the party
in power, an electoral landslide changes the men at the helm
and a revolution is avoided. Ballots, not bullets. No other form
of government guarantees broader opportunities to all social
forces wanting to have a say in the business of the community.
No other form of government thwarts more effectively the
establishment and enforcement of political monopolies by any
organized minority. No other form of government forces a
quicker adaptation to new conditions upon political classes or
makes easier the wiping out of those political classes no longer
fit to survive. No other form of government gives greater op-
portunities to assert themselves to individuals having something
to say and the urge to assert themselves.

As far as the party in power is concerned, not even its mem-
bers are “sovereign” in the sense that they rule the country.
In that monument of common sense which is John Stuart Mill’s

GAETANO SALVEMINI

345

Considerations on Representative Government (Chapter V), it
is clearly stated that “instead of the function of governing, for
which it is radically unfit > the proper office of a representative
assembly is to watch and control the government” : to throw
the light of publicity on its acts; to censure them if found con-
demnable ; to expel from office the men who compose the gov-
ernment if they fulfill their trust in a manner which conflicts
with the deliberate sense of the country, and to be “the nation’s
Committee of Grievances and its Congress of Opinions.”

The philosophy of dictatorship is based on the assumption
that humanity is divided into two parts: the “common herd”
and the “chosen few.” “Some are, and must be, greater than
the rest.” “The best must rule the rest.” But the “chosen few,”
the “best” must be chosen by someone. This is the business of
the dictator. “Authority comes from above.” The dictator is
infallible. He is the predestined Man, the Savior, the Healer,
something like a Man-God who rules and exacts obedience by
the force of his personal superiority over all other men and
women. The dictator and his chosen few are allegedly endowed
with the mysterious gift of ignoring their private interests and
of being acquainted with the higher demands not only of the
present generation but also of the future ones of centuries and
millennia to come. This is why the classes must rule and the
masses must obey.

The Catholic Church is the most perfectly organized reli-
gious dictatorship. The Pope chooses the bishops, who, in turn,
ordain the priests. Bishops and priests together form the class
of the “chosen few” to whom the faithful owe unquestioning
obedience. One God, one truth, one shepherd, and one flock to
be guarded from sin and error. This is the logical outcome of
the doctrine according to which the Pope is divinely inspired.
Gregory XVI, who, upon his death in 1846, left the finances
of the Church in indescribable confusion, was convinced that he
was infallible even in financial matters. According to the Vatican
Council, however, the Pope is infallible only when he speaks
ex cathedra. But there are zealots who hold that whoever ques-
tions his teachings, even when not speaking ex cathedra, com-
mits a sin of pride. Pius XII, in his address of August 24, 1939,

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announced that the rulers of all peoples through his voice
heard the voice of Christ,” that he spoke “in the name of God,
of Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Ghost,” and that he “brought
to men the word of Jesus Christ.”

Under the old absolutist monarchies, the King was not as in-
fallible as the Pope, but he was king by divine right and en-
joyed the privilege of particular assistance from Heaven. For
the sincere monarchist there is something divine even in a con-
stitutional king: “Those of us who were brought up in the Vic-
torian period,” writes an English Tory, “were taught to look
on the Queen as a being perfect in wisdom and goodness. To a
Victorian child it was perhaps only her sex that distinguished
her from the Deity 5 and she was much nearer than God to her
people. . . . To her subjects, if not dea } she was at least Jzw.” 2
The consistent monarchist tolerates parliamentary institutions
only as long as parliamentary majorities do not come into con-
flict with the plans of the sovereign, or rather of the “Crown”
or the “Throne” (abstract terms are better fitted to arouse
mystical feelings). When a conflict does occur, the consistent
monarchist cannot fail to side with the infallible Throne.

Modern dictators are no less infallible than kings by divine
right. “Mussolini is always right” — teaches the catechism of the
perfect Fascist in Italy. “For the young Fascists,” wrote a corre-
spondent of the London Times (October 25, 1935), “Musso-
lini is a God.” A high official of the Department of Public Edu-
cation told a French newspaperman: “Mussolini is the center
of everything. For our children Mussolini is Divine Provi-
dence. Mussolini is a hero. Mussolini is a God.” 3 The Catholic
Church cannot adopt this doctrine. Yet Pius XI, in December,
1926, went as far as to certify that Mussolini had been “sent by
Divine Providence.”

In Germany, Goering proclaims: “We Nazis believe that in
political affairs Adolf Hitler is infallible, just as the Roman
Catholic believes that in religious matters the Pope is infallible.
His will is my law.” At the National Convention of the Hitler
Youth Movement in February, 1937, the leader of the German

2 0 . Christie, The Transition from Aristocracy , pp. 202-03.

3 Echo de Paris , September 30, 1935.

GAETANO SALVEMINX

347

Labor Front, Dr. Ley, made the following “confession of
faith”: “We believe that God has sent us Adolf Hitler, so that
Germany may receive a foundation for its existence through all
eternity.” Dr. Hans Fraulk, Governor-General of German-
occupied Poland, said on February i, 1940: “Today the world
knows that this one man [Hitler] in all history, this great
shaper of German destiny, is a man truly sent to us by Almighty
God.” Hitler in person has made the following pronouncement:
“Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liber-
ator of humanity. I am freeing men from the demands of a
freedom and personal independence which only a few can sus-
tain.” No Pope, however, has yet given him a certificate similar
to that which has been given Mussolini. But if Hitler decides
to respect his concordat with the Vatican, some fine day he will
get the same anointment.

One who can never aspire to such privilege is godless Stalin.
But even he has his source of infallible inspiration in the Com-
munist Manifesto. Karl Marx begot Nicolai Lenin, and Nicolai
Lenin begot Joseph Stalin. In truth, the Communist doctrine
does not exalt one single man above all others, but places above
all other classes a collective idol, “the proletariat.” The leader
of the Communist Party is supposed to have received his power
from “the proletariat,” and not to have conquered it by his
own personal strength. All that the Communists say and do is
meant to heighten the prestige of that collective entity, “the pro-
letariat,” and not to swell the prestige of one individual. But
sporadic tendencies toward a personal deification of Stalin ap-
pear now and then. On December 5, 1939, the Soviet radio de-
scribed Stalin as “the blazing sun of the whole earth.” It is
impossible to underestimate human intelligence. So Stalin may
also become an infallible God.

Whether provided with divine inspiration or not, dictators
are infallible. The leader of a democratic regime says to his
adversaries: “I believe I am right and that you are wrong. Let
me try and see what are the results of my policies. If they prove
unsatisfactory, you will then have your chance to do otherwise.”
The dictator says: “I am right and the results of my policies
cannot but be satisfactory. Every man must be either for me or

FREEDOM

348

against me. Whoever declares himself against me will find him-
self in jail.”

The basic assumption of democratic doctrine is humility. Jus-
tice Holmes used to say that a democrat is merely a person who
does not imagine himself to be a god. Humility is the highway
to tolerance and freedom. Intolerance in all dictatorships, be
they fascist or communist, be they political or religious, springs
from one source which is common to all, pride. If an infallible
God were to take over the care of our happiness and salvation,
the dictatorship of that God would be the most suitable political
regime for ensuring the welfare of the people. Anyone opposing
that infallible God would be either a fool or a wicked enemy
of the community. His opposition to the infallible God would
be an absurdity or a crime. In the event that he could not be
convinced by propaganda, he should be put out of the way by
fire or the sword. He who is convinced that he possesses the
infallible secret of making men wise and happy is ever ready
to kill. Robespierre was an incorruptible man who harbored an
unmistakable faith in his own righteousness. There was no dif-
ference, from this standpoint, between him and the Inquisitor
of whom El Greco has left us such a telling portrait. Robes-
pierre therefore sent a great number of people to the guillotine.

The Catholic Church today is disarmed and therefore no
longer burns heretics. It has to be satisfied with sentencing them
to the eternal fires of the hereafter. Stalin, Mussolini, and Hit-
ler are armed. They control this world, not the next. What for
religious authorities is a sin is for them a crime. They therefore
sentence to death.

Basically, a conflict between two moral outlooks underlies the
conflict between the democratic and the dictatorial philosophies.
If one likes to bully weaker people and is prepared to bow
before any bully stronger than oneself, one longs for a dictator.
If one does not like either to bully or be bullied, one cleaves
to democratic institutions. The choice depends on the amount
of respect one feels for others and for oneself.

Louis D. Brandeis

Former Associate Justice of the Suf rente Court
of the United States

TRUE AMERICANISM

jr~i PLURIBUS UNUM was the motto adopted by the
founders of the Republic when they formed a union of
A. J the thirteen States. To these we have added, from time
to time, thirty-five more. The founders were convinced, as we

are, that a strong nation could be built through federation.
They were also convinced, as we are, that in America, under a
a free government, many peoples would make one nation.
Throughout all these years we have admitted to our country
and to citizenship immigrants from the diverse lands of Europe.
We had faith that thereby we would best serve ourselves and
mankind. This faith has been justified. The United States has
grown great. The immigrants and their immediate descendants
have proved themselves as loyal as any citizens of the country.
Liberty has knit us closely together as Americans.

AMERICANIZATION

But what is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a super-
ficial way, when the immigrant adopts the manners and the
customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the
manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother
tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.
But the adoption of our language, manners, and customs is only
a small part of the process. To become Americanized the change
wrought must be fundamental. However great his outward

349

FREEDOM

350

“conformity ? the immigrant is not Americanized unless his inter-
ests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we
properly demand of the immigrant even more than this. He
must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and
aspirations and co-operate with us for their attainment. Only
when this has been done will he possess the national conscious-
ness of an American. I say, “He must be brought into complete
harmony. 73 But let us not forget that many a poor immigrant
comes to us from distant lands, ignorant of our language and
with jarring manners, who is already truly American in this
most important sense ; who has long shared our ideals and who,
oppressed and persecuted abroad, has yearned for our land of
liberty and for the opportunity of aiding in the realization of its
aims.

AMERICAN IDEALS

What are the American ideals? They are the development
of the individual for his own and the common good 5 the devel-
opment of the individual through liberty and the attainment
of the common good through democracy and social justice.

Our form of government, as well as humanity, compels us
to strive for the development of the individual man. Under
universal suffrage every voter is a part ruler of the State. Un-
less the rulers have, in the main, education and character and
are free men, our great experiment in democracy must fail. It
devolves upon the State, therefore, to fit its rulers for their task.
It must provide not only facilities for development but the
opportunity of using them. It must not only provide oppor-
tunity j it must stimulate the desire to avail of it. Thus we are
compelled to insist upon the observance of what we somewhat
vaguely term the American standard of -living j we become
necessarily our brothers 7 keepers.

THE AMERICAN STANDARD OF LIVING

What does this standard imply? In substance, the exercise
of those rights which our Constitution guarantees — the right to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life, in this connec-.

LOUIS D. BRANDEIS

351

tion, means living, not existing; liberty, freedom in things in-
dustrial as well as political; happiness includes, among other
things, that satisfaction which can come only through the full
development and utilization of one’s faculties. In order that
men may live and not merely exist, in order that men may
develop their faculties, they must have a reasonable income;
they must have health and leisure. High wages will not meet
the worker’s need unless employment be regular. The best of
wages will not compensate for excessively long working hours
which undermine health. And working conditions may be so
bad as to nullify the good effects of high wages and short hours.
The essentials of American citizenship are not satisfied by sup-
plying merely the material needs or even the wants of the
worker.

Every citizen must have education — broad and continuous.
This essential of citizenship is not met by an education which
ends at the age of fourteen, or even at eighteen or twenty-two.
Education must continue throughout life. A country cannot be
governed well by rulers whose education and mental develop-
ment are gained only from their attendance at the common
school. Whether the education of the citizen in later years is
to be given in classes or from the public platform, or is to be
supplied through discussion in the lodges and the trade unions,
or is to be gained from the reading of papers, periodicals, and
books, in any case, freshness of mind is indispensable to its
attainment. And to the preservation of freshness of mind a
short workday is as essential as adequate food and proper con-
ditions of working and of living. The worker must, in other
words, have leisure. But leisure does not imply idleness. It
means ability to work not less but more, ability to work at some-
thing besides breadwinning, ability to work harder while work-
ing at breadwinning, and ability to work more years at bread-
winning. Leisure, so defined, is an essential of successful
democracy.

Furthermore, the citizen in a successful democracy must not
only have education; he must be free. Men are not free if
dependent industrially upon the arbitrary will of another. In-
dustrial liberty on the part of the worker cannot, therefore,

FREEDOM

352

exist if there be overweening industrial power. Some curb must
be placed upon capitalistic combination. Nor will even this curb
be effective unless the workers co-operate, as in trade unions.
Control and co-operation are both essential to industrial liberty.

And if the American is to be fitted for his task as ruler, he
must have besides education and industrial liberty also some
degree of financial independence. Our existing industrial sys-
tem is converting an ever increasing percentage of the popu-
lation into wage-earners 3 and experience teaches us that a large
part of these become at some time financial dependents, by
reason of sickness, accident, invalidity, superannuation, unem-
ployment, or premature death of the breadwinner of the fam-
ily, Contingencies like these, which are generally referred to
in the individual case as misfortunes, are now recognized as
ordinary incidents in the life of the wage-earner. The need of
providing indemnity against financial losses from such ordi-
nary contingencies in the workingman’s life has become appar-
ent and is already being supplied in some countries. The stan-
dard worthy to be called American implies some system of social
insurance.

And since the child is the father of the man, we must bear
constantly in mind that the American standard of living can-
not be attained or preserved unless the child is not only well
fed but well born; unless he lives under conditions wholesome
morally as well as physically; unless he is given education ade-
quate both in quantity and in character to fit him for life’s work.

THE DISTINCTLY AMERICAN

Such are our ideals and the standard of living we have erected
for ourselves. But what is there in these ideals which is pecul-
iarly American? Many nations seek to develop the individual
man for himself and for the common good. Some are as liberty-
loving as we. Some pride themselves upon institutions more
democratic than our own. Still others, less conspicuous for lib-
erty or democracy, claim to be more successful in attaining
social justice. And we are not the only nation which combines
love of liberty with the practice of democracy and a longing

LOUIS D. BRANDEIS

353

for social justice. But there is one feature in our ideals and
practices which is peculiarly American. It is inclusive brother-
hood.

Other countries, while developing the individual man, have
assumed that their common good would be attained only if
the privileges of their citizenship should be limited practically
to natives or to persons of a particular nationality. America,
on the other hand, has always declared herself for equality of
nationalities as well as for equality of individuals. It recognizes
racial equality as an essential of full human liberty and true
brotherhood, and that racial equality is the complement of
democracy. America has, therefore, given like welcome to all
the peoples of Europe.

Democracy rests upon two pillars: one, the principle that all
men are equally entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness j and the other, the conviction that such equal oppor-
tunity will most advance civilization. Aristocracy, on the other
hand, denies both these postulates. It rests upon the principle
of the superman. It willingly subordinates the many to the
few and seeks to justify sacrificing the individual by insisting
that civilization will be advanced by such sacrifices.

The struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
both in peace and in war were devoted largely to overcoming
the aristocratic position as applied to individuals. In establish-
ing the equal right of every person to development it became
clear that equal opportunity for all involves this necessary
limitation: each man may develop himself so far, but only so
far, as his doing so will not interfere with the exercise of a like
right by all others. Thus liberty came to mean the right to
enjoy life, to acquire property, to pursue happiness in such
manner and to such extent only as the exercise of the right in
each is consistent with the exercise of a like right by every other
of our fellow citizens. Liberty thus defined underlies twentieth-
century democracy. Liberty thus defined exists in a part of the
Western world. And even where this equal right of each indi-
vidual has not yet been accepted as a political right, its ethical
claim is indisputable.

America, dedicated to liberty and the brotherhood of man,

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354

rejected the aristocratic principle of the superman as applied
to peoples as it rejected the principle when applied to indi-
viduals. America has believed that each race has something of
peculiar value which it can contribute to the attainment of those
high ideals for which it is striving. America has believed that
we must not only give to the immigrant the best that we have,
but must preserve for America the good that is in the immi-
grant and develop in him the best of which he is capable. Amer-
ica has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies
the path of progress. It acted on this belief 5 it has advanced
human happiness, and it has prospered.

WAR AND PEACE

On the other hand, the aristocratic theory as applied to peo-
ples survived generally throughout Europe. It was there as-
sumed by the stronger countries that the full development of
one people necessarily involved its domination over another,
and that only by such domination would civilization advance.
Strong nationalities, assuming their own superiority, came to
believe that they possessed the divine right to subject other
peoples to their sway; and the belief in the existence of such
a right ripened into a conviction that there was also a duty to
exercise it.

The movements of the last century have proved that whole
peoples have individuality no less marked than that of the sin-
gle person; that the individuality of a people is irrepressible;
and that the misnamed internationalism which seeks the oblit-
eration of nationalities or peoples is reprehensible. The new na-
tionalism adopted by America proclaims that each race or peo-
ple, like each individual, has the right and duty to develop, and
that only through such differentiated development will high
civilization be attained. Not until these principles of national-
ism, like those of democracy, are generally accepted will liberty
be fully attained and minorities be secure in their rights. Not
until then can the foundation be laid for a lasting peace among
the nations.

The world turns anxiously to the United States, the one

LOUIS D. BRANDEIS

355

great democratic, liberal country, and bids us point the way.
And may we not answer: Go the way of liberty and justice —
led by democracy. Without these, international congresses and
supreme courts will prove vain and peace “the Great Illusion.”
And let us remember the poor parson of whom Chaucer says:

“But Criste’s loore, and his Apostles twelve,

He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve.”

4. CULTURAL PATTERNS FOR FREEDOM

John Dewey

Professor Emeritus of Philosofhy, Columbia University

THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM

W HAT is freedom and why is it prized? Is desire for
freedom inherent in human nature or is it a product
of special circumstances? Is it wanted as an end or
as a means of getting other things? Does its possession entail
responsibilities, and are these responsibilities so onerous that
the mass of men will readily surrender liberty for the sake of
greater ease? Is the struggle for liberty so arduous that most
men are easily distracted from the endeavor to achieve and
maintain it? Does freedom in itself and in the things it brings
with it seem as important as security of livelihood 5 as food,
shelter, clothing, or even as having a good time? Did man
ever care as much for it as we in this country have been taught
to believe? Is there any truth in the old notion that the driv-
ing force in political history has been the effort of the common
man to achieve freedom? Was our own struggle for political
independence in any genuine sense animated by desire for
freedom, or were there a number of discomforts that our ances-
tors wanted to get rid of, things having nothing in common
save that they were felt to be troublesome?

Is love of liberty ever anything more than, a desire to be
liberated from some special restriction? And when it is got
rid of does the desire for liberty die down until something
else feels intolerable? Again, how does the desire for freedom
compare in intensity with the desire to feel equal with others,
especially with those who have previously been called superiors?

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FREEDOM

360

How do the fruits of liberty compare with the enjoyments
that spring from a feeling of union, of solidarity, with others?
Will men surrender their liberties if they believe that by so
doing they will obtain the satisfaction that comes from a sense
of fusion with others and that respect by others which is the
product of the strength furnished by solidarity?

The present state of the world is putting questions like these
to citizens of all democratic countries. It is putting them with
special force to us in a country where democratic institutions
have been bound up with a certain tradition, the “ideology”
of which the Declaration of Independence is the classic expres-
sion. This tradition has taught us that attainment of freedom
is the goal of political history, that self-government is the
inherent right of free men and is that which, when it is
achieved, men prize above all else. Yet as we look at the world
we see supposedly free institutions in many countries not so
much overthrown as abandoned willingly, apparently with en-
thusiasm. We may infer that what has happened is proof they
never existed in reality but only in name. Or we may console
ourselves with a belief that unusual conditions, such as national
frustration and humiliation, have led men to welcome any kind
of government that promised to restore national self-respect.
But conditions in our country as well as the eclipse of democ-
racy in other countries compel us to ask questions about the
career and fate of free societies, even our own.

There perhaps was a time when the questions asked would
have seemed to be mainly or exclusively political. Now we
know better. For we know that a large part of the causes which
have produced the conditions that are expressed in the ques-
tions is the dependence of politics upon other forces, notably
the economic. The problem of the constitution of human nature
is involved, since it is part of our tradition that love of freedom
is inherent in its make-up. Is the popular psychology of democ-
racy a myth? The old doctrine about human nature was also
tied up with the ethical belief that political democracy is a
moral right and that the laws upon which it is based are funda-
mental moral laws which every form of social organization
should obey. If belief in natural rights and natural laws as

JOHN DEWEY 36 I

the foundation of free government is surrendered, does the
latter have any other moral basis? For while it would be fool-
ish to believe that the American Colonies fought the battles
that secured their independence and that they built their gov-
ernment consciously and deliberately upon a foundation of psy-
chological and moral theories, yet the democratic tradition, call
it dream or call it penetrating vision, was so closely allied with
beliefs about human nature and about the moral ends which
political institutions should serve, that a rude shock occurs
when these affiliations break down. Is there anything to take
their place, anything that will give the kind of support they
once gave?

The problems behind the questions asked, the forces which
give the questions their urgency, go beyond the particular be-
liefs which formed the early psychological and moral founda-
tion of democracy. After ■ retiring from public office, Thomas
Jefferson in his old age carried on a friendly philosophical
correspondence with John Adams. In one of his letters he made
a statement about existing American conditions and expressed
a hope about their future estate: “The advance of liberalism
encourages a hope that the human mind will some day get back
to the freedom it enjoyed two thousand years ago. This coun-
try, which has given to the world the example of physical lib-
erty, owes to it that of moral emancipation also, for as yet it
is but nominal with us. The inquisition of public opinion over-
whelms in practice the freedom asserted by the laws in theory.”
The situation that has developed since his time may well lead
us to reverse the ideas he expressed, and inquire whether polit-
ical freedom can be maintained without that freedom of culture
which he expected to be the final result of political freedom.
It is no longer easy to entertain the hope that given political
freedom as the one thing necessary all other things will in
time be added to it — and so to us. For we now know that the
relations which exist between persons, outside of political insti-
tutions, relations of industry, of communication, of science, art,
and religion, affect daily associations, and thereby deeply affect
the attitudes and habits expressed in government and rules of
law. If it is true that the political and legal react to shape the

FREEDOM

362

other things, it is even more true that political institutions are
an effect, not a cause.

It is this knowledge that sets the theme to be discussed. For
this complex of conditions which taxes the terms upon which
human beings associate and live together is summed up in the
word “culture,” The problem is to know what kind of culture
is so free in itself that it conceives and begets political freedom
as its accompaniment and consequence. What about the state of
science and knowledge 5 of the arts, fine and technological 5 of
friendships and family life 5 of business and finance 5 of the
attitudes and dispositions created in the give and take of ordi-
nary day-by-day associations? No matter what is the native
make-up of human nature, its working activities, those which
respond to institutions and rules and which finally shape the
pattern of the latter, are created by the whole body of occupa-
tions, interests, skills, beliefs, that constitute a given culture. As
the latter changes, especially as it grows complex and intricate
in the way in which American life has changed since our polit-
ical organization took shape, new problems take the place of
those governing the earlier formation and distribution of polit-
ical powers. The view that love of freedom is so inherent in
man that, if it only has a chance given it by abolition of oppres-
sions exercised by Church and State, it will produce and main-
tain free institutions is no longer adequate. The idea naturally
arose when settlers in a new country felt that the distance they
had put between themselves and the forces that oppressed them
effectively symbolized everything that stood between them and
permanent achievement of freedom. We are now forced to see
that positive conditions, forming the prevailing state of culture,
are required. Release from oppressions and repressions which
previously existed marked a necessary transition, but transitions
are but bridges to something different.

Early republicans were obliged even in their own time to
note that general conditions, such as are summed up under the
name of culture, had a good deal to do with political institu-
tions. For they held that oppressions of State and Church had
exercised a corrupting influence upon human nature, so that
the original impulse to liberty had either been lost or warped

JOHN DEWEY 363

out of shape. This was a virtual admission that surrounding
conditions may be stronger than native tendencies. It proved a
degree of plasticity in human nature that required exercise of
continual solicitude. The Founding Fathers were aware that
love of power is a trait of human nature, so strong a one that
definite barriers had to be erected to keep persons who get into
positions of official authority from encroachments that under-
mine free institutions. Admission that men may be brought by
long habit to hug their chains implies a belief that second or
acquired nature is stronger than original nature.

Jefferson at least went further than this. For his fear of the
growth of manufacturing and trade and his preference for
agrarian pursuits amounted to acceptance of the idea that inter-
ests bred by certain pursuits may fundamentally alter original
human nature and the institutions that are congenial to it. That
the development Jefferson dreaded has come about and to a
much greater degree than he could have anticipated is an ob-
vious fact. We face today the consequences of the fact that an
agricultural and rural people has become an urban industrial
population.

Proof is decisive that economic factors are an intrinsic part
of the culture that determines the actual turn taken by political
measures and rules, no matter what verbal beliefs are held.
Although it later became the fashion to blur the connection
which exists between economics and politics, and even to re-
prove those who called attention to it, Madison as well as
Jefferson was quite aware of the connection and of its bearing
upon democracy. Knowledge that the connection demanded a
general distribution of property and the prevention of rise of
the extremely poor and the extremely rich was however differ-
ent from explicit recognition of a relation between culture and
nature so intimate that the former may shape the patterns of
thought and action.

Economic relations and habits cannot be set apart in isolation
any more than political institutions can be. The state of knowl-
edge of nature, that is, of physical science, is a phase of culture
upon which industry and commerce, the production and distri-
bution of goods and the regulation of services, directly depend.

364 FREEDOM

Unless we take into account the rise of the new science of nature
in the seventeenth century and its growth to its present state,
our economic agencies of production and distribution and ulti-
mately of consumption cannot be understood. The connection
of the events of the industrial revolution with those of the
advancing scientific revolution is an incontrovertible witness.

It has not been customary to include the arts, the fine arts,
as an important part of the social conditions that bear upon
democratic institutions and personal freedom. Even after the
influence of the state of industry and of natural science has been
admitted, we still tend to draw the line at the idea that litera-
ture, music, painting, the drama, architecture, have any intimate
connection with the cultural bases of democracy. Even those
who call themselves good democrats are often content to look
upon the fruits of these arts as adornments of culture rather
than as things in whose enjoyment all should partake, if democ-
racy is to be a reality. The state of things in totalitarian coun-
tries may induce us to revise this opinion. For it proves that no
matter what may be the case with the impulses and powers that
lead the creative artist to do his work, works of art once brought
into existence are the most compelling of the means of com-
munication by which emotions are stirred and opinions formed.
The theater, the movie and music hall, even the picture gallery,
eloquence, popular parades, common sports, and recreative
agencies, have all been brought under regulation as part of the
propaganda agencies by which dictatorship is kept in power
without being regarded by the masses as oppressive. We are
beginning to realize that emotions and imagination are more
potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than informa-
tion and reason.

Indeed, long before the present crisis came into being there
was a saying that if one could control the songs of a nation, one
need not care who made its laws. And historical study shows
that primitive religions owe their power in determining belief
and action to their ability to reach emotions and imagination by
rites and ceremonies, by legend and folklore, ail clothed with
the traits that mark works of art. The Church that has had by
far the greatest influence in the modern world took over their

JOHN DEWEY 365

agencies of esthetic appeal and incorporated them into its own
structure, after adapting them to its own purpose, in winning
and holding the allegiance of the masses.

A totalitarian regime is committed to control of the whole
life of all its subjects by its hold over feelings, desires, emo-
tions, as well as opinions. This indeed is a mere truism, since
a totalitarian state has to be total. But save as we take it into
account we shall not appreciate the intensity of the revival of
the warfare between State and Church that exists in Germany
and Russia. The conflict is not the expression of the whim of a
leader. It is inherent in any regime that demands the total alle-
giance of all its subjects. It must first of all, and most endur-
ingly of all, if it is to be permanent, command the imagination,
with all the impulses and motives we have been accustomed to
call “inner.” Religious organizations are those which rule by
use of these means, and for that reason are an inherent com-
petitor with any political state that sets out on the totalitarian
road. Thus it is that the very things that seem to us in demo-
cratic countries the most obnoxious features of the totalitarian
state are the very things for which its advocates recommend it.
They are the things for whose absence they denounce demo-
cratic countries. For they say that failure to enlist the whole
make-up of citizens, emotional as well as ideological, condemns
democratic states to employ merely external and mechanical
devices to hold the loyal support of its citizens. We may regard
all this as a symptom of a collective hallucination, such as at
times seems to have captured whole populations. But even so,
we must recognize the influence of this factor if we are our-
selves to escape collective delusion — that totalitarianism rests
upon external coercion alone.

Finally, the moral factor is an intrinsic part of the complex
of social forces called culture. For no matter whether or not
one shares the view, now held on different grounds by different
groups, that there is no scientific ground or warrant for moral
conviction and judgments, it is certain that human beings hold
some things dearer than they do others, and that they struggle
for the things they prize, spending time and energy in their
behalf: doing so indeed to such an extent that the best measure

FREEDOM

366

we have of what is valued is the effort spent in its behalf. Not
only so, but for a number of persons to form anything that can
be called a community in its pregnant sense there must be
values prized in common. Without them, any so-called social
group, class, people, nation, tends to fall apart into molecules
having but mechanically enforced connections with one another.
For the present at least we do not have to ask whether values
are moral, having a kind of life and potency of their own, or
are but by-products of the working of other conditions, bio-
logical, economic, or whatever.

The qualification will indeed seem quite superfluous to most,
so habituated have most persons become to believing, at least
nominally, that moral forces are the ultimate determinants of
the rise and fall of all human societies— while religion has
taught many to believe that cosmic as well as social forces are
regulated in behalf of moral ends. The qualification is intro-
duced, nevertheless, because of the existence of a school of
philosophy holding that opinions about the values which move
conduct are lacking in any scientific standing, since (according
to them) the only things that can be known are physical events.
The denial that values have any influence in the long run on
the course of events is also characteristic of the Marxist belief
that forces of production ultimately control every human rela-
tionship. The idea of the impossibility of intellectual regula-
tion of ideas and judgments about values is shared by a number
of intellectuals who have been dazzled by the success of mathe-
matical and physical science. These last remarks suggest that
there is at least one other factor in culture which needs some
attention: namely, the existence of schools of social philosophy,
of competing ideologies.

The intent of the previous discussion should be obvious. The
problem of freedom and of democratic institutions is tied up
with the question of what kind of culture exists 5 with the neces-
sity of free culture for free political institutions. The import
of this conclusion extends far beyond its contrast with the sim-
pler faith of those who formulated the democratic tradition.
The question of human psychology, of the make-up of human
nature in its original state, is involved. It is involved not just

JOHN DEWEY 367

in a general way but with respect to its special constituents and
their significance in their relations to one another. For every
social and political philosophy currently professed will be found
upon examination to involve a certain view about the constitu-
tion of human nature: in itself and in its relation to physical
nature. What is true of this factor is true of every factor in
culture, so that they need not here be listed again, although it
is necessary to bear them all in mind if we are to appreciate
the variety of factors involved in the problem of human free-
dom.

Running through the problem of the relation of this and
that constituent of culture to social institutions in general and
political democracy in particular is a question rarely asked. Yet
it so underlies any critical consideration of the principles of
each of them that some conclusion on the matter ultimately
decides the position taken on each special issue. The question
is whether any one of the factors is so predominant that it is the
causal force, so that other factors are secondary and derived
effects. Some kind of answer in what philosophers call a monis-
tic direction has been usually given. The most obvious present
example is the belief that economic conditions are ultimately
the controlling forces in human relationships. It is perhaps sig-
nificant that this view is comparatively recent. At the height
of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment, the prevailing view,
gave final supremacy to reason, to the advance of science and
to education. Even during the last century, a view was held
which is expressed in the motto of a certain school of historians:
“History is past politics and politics is present history.”

Because of the present fashion of economic explanation, this
political view may now seem to have been the crotchet of a
particular set of historical scholars. But, after all, it only formu-
lated an idea consistently acted upon during the period of the
formation of national states. It is possible to regard the present
emphasis upon economic factors as a sort of intellectual revenge
taken upon its earlier all but total neglect. The very word po-
litical economy” suggests how completely economic considera-
tions were once subordinated to political. The book that was
influential in putting an end to this subjection, Adam Smith’s

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368

Wealth of Nations , continued in its title, though not its con-
tents, the older tradition. In the Greek period, we find that
Aristotle makes the political factor so controlling that all nor-
mal economic activities are relegated to the household, so that
all morally justifiable economic practice is literally domestic
economy. And in spite of the recent vogue of the Marxist
theory, Oppenheim has produced a considerable body of evi-
dence in support of the thesis that political states are the result
of military conquests in which defeated people have become
subjects of their conquerors, who, by assuming rule over the
conquered, begot the first political states.

The rise of totalitarian states cannot, because of the bare fact
of their totalitarianism, be regarded as mere reversions to the
earlier theory of supremacy of the political institutional factor.
Yet as compared with theories that had subordinated the polit-
ical to the economic, whether in the Marxist form or in that of
the British classical school, it marks reversion to ideas and still
more to practices which it was supposed had disappeared for-
ever from the conduct of any modern state. And the practices
have been revived and extended with the benefit of scientific
technique of control of industry, finance, and commerce in ways
which show the earlier governmental officials who adopted
“mercantile” economics in the interest of government were the
veriest bunglers at their professed job.

The idea that morals ought to be, even if they are not, the
supreme regulator of social affairs is not so widely entertained
as it once was, and there are circumstances which support the
conclusion that when moral forces were as influential as they
were supposed to be it was because morals were identical with
customs which happened in fact to regulate the relations of
human beings with one another. However, the idea is still ad-
vanced by sermons from the pulpit and editorials from the
press that adoption of, say, the Golden Rule would speedily do
away with all social discord and trouble; and as I write the
newspapers report the progress of a campaign for something
called “moral rearmament.” Upon a deeper level, the point
made about the alleged identity of ethics with established cus-
toms raises the question whether the effect of the disintegra-

JOHN DEWEY 369

tion of customs that for a long time held men together in social
groups can be overcome save by development of new generally
accepted traditions and customs. This development, upon this
view, would be equivalent to the creation of a new ethics.

However, such questions are here brought up for the sake
of the emphasis they place upon the question already raised: Is
there any one factor or phase of culture which is dominant, or
which tends to produce and regulate others, or are economics,
morals, art, science, and so on only so many aspects of the
interaction of a number of factors, each of which acts upon
and is acted upon by the others? In the professional language
of philosophy: Shall our point of view be monistic or plural-
istic? The same question recurs moreover about each one of
the factors listed — about economics, about politics, about science,
about art. I shall here illustrate the point by reference not to
any of these things but to theories that have at various times
been influential about the make-up of human nature. For these
psychological theories have been marked by serious attempts
to make some one constituent of human nature the source of
motivation of action; or at least to reduce all conduct to the
action of a small number of alleged native “forces.” A com-
paratively recent example was the adoption by the classic school
of economic theory of self-interest as the main motivating force
of human behavior; an idea linked up on its technical side
with the notion that pleasure and pain are the causes and the
ends in view of all conscious human conduct, in desire to obtain
one and avoid the other. Then there was a view that self-
interest and sympathy are the two components of human na-
ture, as opposed and balanced centrifugal and centripetal tend-
encies are the moving forces of celestial nature.

Just now the favorite ideological psychological candidate for
control of human activity is love of power. Reasons for its
selection are not far to seek. Success of search for economic
profit turned out to be largely conditioned in fact upon posses-
sion of superior power while success reacted to increase power.
Then the rise of national states has been attended by such vast
and flagrant organization of military and naval force that pol-
itics have become more and more markedly power politics,

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370

leading to the conclusion that there is not any other kind,
although in the past the power element has been more decently
and decorously covered up. One interpretation of the Darwin-
ian struggle for existence and survival of the fittest was used
as ideological support; and some writers, notably Nietzsche
(though not in the crude form often alleged), proposed an
ethics of power in opposition to the supposed Christian ethics
of sacrifice.

Because human nature is the factor which in one way or an-
other is always interacting with environing conditions in produc-
tion of culture, the theme receives special attention elsewhere.
But the shift that has occurred from time to time in theories
that have gained currency about the “ruling motive” in human
nature suggests a question which is seldom asked. It is the
question whether these psychologies have not in fact taken
the cart to be the horse. Have they not gathered their notion
as to the ruling element in human nature from observation of
tendencies that are marked in contemporary collective life, and
then bunched these tendencies together in some alleged psy-
chological “force” as their cause? It is significant that human
nature was taken to be strongly moved by an inherent love of
freedom at the time when there was a struggle for representa-
tive government; that the motive of self-interest appeared
when conditions in England enlarged the role of money, be-
cause of new methods of industrial production; that the growth
of organized philanthropic activities brought sympathy into
the psychological picture; and that events today are readily
converted into love of power as the mainspring of human
action.

In any case, the idea of culture that has been made familiar
by the work of anthropological students points to the conclu-
sion that whatever are the native constituents of human nature,
the culture of a period and group is the determining influence
in their arrangement; it is that which determines the patterns
of behavior that mark out the activities of any group, family,
clan, people, sect, faction, class. It is at least as true that the
state of culture determines the order and arrangement of na-
tive tendencies as that human nature produces any particular

JOHN DEWEY 37 I

set or system of social phenomena so as to obtain satisfaction
for itself. The problem is to find out the way in which the ele-
ments of a culture interact with each other and the way in
which the elements of human nature are caused to interact
with one another under conditions set by their interaction with
the existing environment. For example, if our American cul-
ture is largely a pecuniary culture, it is not because the original
or innate structure of human nature tends of itself to obtain-
ing pecuniary profit. It is rather that a certain complex culture
stimulates, promotes, and consolidates native tendencies so as
to produce a certain pattern of desires and purposes. If we
take all the communities, peoples, classes, tribes, and nations
that ever existed, we may be sure that since human nature in
its native constitution is the relative constant, it cannot be ap-
pealed to, in isolation, to account for the multitude of diversi-
ties presented by different forms of association.

Primitive peoples for reasons that are now pretty evident
attribute magical qualities to blood. Popular beliefs about race
and inherent race differences have virtually perpetuated the
older superstitions. Anthropologists are practically all agreed
that the differences we find in different “races” are not due to
anything in inherent physiological structure but to the effects
exercised upon members of various groups by the cultural
conditions under which they are reared $ conditions that act
upon raw or original human nature unremittingly from the
very moment of birth. It has always been known that infants,
bom without ability in any language, come to speak the lan-
guage, whatever it may be, of the community in which they
were born. Like most uniform phenomena the fact aroused no
curiosity and led to no generalization about the influence of
cultural conditions. It was taken for granted j as a matter of
course it was so “natural” as to appear inevitable. Only since
the rise of systematic inquiries carried on by anthropological
students has it been noted that the conditions of culture which
bring about the common language of a given group produce
other traits they have in common — traits which like the mother
tongue differentiate one group or society from others.

Culture as a complex body of customs tends to maintain

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372

itself. It can reproduce itself only through effecting certain
differential changes in the original or native constitutions of its
members. Each culture has its own pattern, its own charac-
teristic arrangement of its constituent energies. By the mere
force of its existence as well as by deliberately adopted methods
systematically pursued, it perpetuates itself through transfor-
mation of the raw or original human nature of those born im-
mature.

These statements do not signify that biological heredity and
native individual differences are of no importance. They sig-
nify that as they operate within a given social form, they are
shaped and take effect within that particular form. They are
not indigenous traits that mark off one people, one group, one
class, from another, but mark differences in every group. What-
ever the “white man’s burden,” it was not imposed by heredity.

We have traveled a seemingly long way from the questions
with which we set out, so that it may appear that they had been
forgotten on the journey. But the journey was undertaken for
the sake of finding out something about the nature of the prob-
lem that is expressed in the questions asked. The maintenance
of democratic institutions is not such a simple matter as was
supposed by some of the Founding Fathers, although the wiser
among them realized how immensely the new political experi-
ment was favored by external circumstances — like the ocean
that separated settlers from the governments that had an inter-
est in using the colonists for their own purposes ; the fact that
feudal institutions had been left behind; the fact that so many
of the settlers had come here to escape restrictions upon reli-
gious beliefs and form of worship; and especially the existence
of a vast territory with free land and immense unappropriated
natural resources.

The function of culture in determining what elements of
human nature are dominant and their pattern or arrangement
in connection with one another goes beyond any special point
to which attention is called. It affects the very idea of indi-
viduality. The idea that human nature is inherently and exclu-
sively individual is itself a product of a cultural individualistic
movement. The idea that mind and consciousness are intrin-

JOHN DEWEY 373

sically individual did not even occur to anyone for much the
greater part of human history. It would have been rejected as
the inevitable source of disorder and chaos if it had occurred
to anyone to suggest it — not that their ideas of human nature
on that account were any better than later ones but that they
also were functions of culture. All that we can safely say is that
human nature, like other forms of life, tends to differentiation,
and this moves in the direction of the distinctively individual,
and that it also tends toward combination, association. In the
lower animals, physical-biological factors determine which tend-
ency is dominant in a given animal or plant species and the
ratio existing between the two factors — whether, for example,
insects are what students call “solitary” or “social.” With hu-
man beings, cultural conditions replace strictly physical ones.
In the earlier periods of human history they acted almost like
physiological conditions as far as deliberate intention was con-
cerned. They were taken to be “natural” and change in them
to be unnatural. At a later period the cultural conditions were
seen to be subject in some degree to deliberate formation. For
a time radicals then identified their policies with the belief that
if only artificial social conditions could be got rid of human
nature would produce almost automatically a certain kind of
social arrangements, those which would give it free scope in
its supposed exclusively individual character.

Tendencies toward sociality, such as sympathy, were ad-
mitted. But they were taken to be traits of an individual iso-
lated by nature, quite as much as, say, a tendency to combine
with others in order to get protection against something threat-
ening one’s own private self. Whether complete identification
of human nature with individuality would be desirable or unde-
sirable if it existed is an idle academic question. For it does not
exist. Some cultural conditions develop the psychological con-
stituents that lead toward differentiation 5 others stimulate those
which lead in the direction of the solidarity of the beehive or
anthill. The human problem is that of securing the develop-
ment of each constituent so that it serves to release and mature
the other. Co-operation — called fraternity in the classic French
formula — is as much a part of the democratic ideal as is per-

374 FREEDOM

sonal initiative. That cultural conditions were allowed to de-
velop (markedly so in the economic phase) which subordinated
co-operativeness to liberty and equality serves to explain the
decline in the two latter. Indirectly, this decline is responsible
for the present tendency to give a bad name to the very word
individualism and to make sociality a term of moral honor
beyond criticism. But that association of nullities on even the
largest scale would constitute a realization of human nature
is as absurd as to suppose that the latter can take place in beings
whose only relations to one another are those entered into in
behalf of exclusive private advantage.

The problem of freedom of co-operative individualities is
then a problem to be viewed in the context of culture. The
state of culture is a state of interaction of many factors, the
chief of which are law and politics, industry and commerce,
science and technology, the arts of expression and communi-
cation, and of morals, or the values men prize and the ways
in which they evaluate them; and finally, though indirectly,
the system of general ideas used by men to justify and to criti-
cize the fundamental conditions under which they live, their
social philosophy. We are concerned with the problem of free-
dom rather than with solutions, in the conviction that solu-
tions are idle until the problem has been placed in the context
of the elements that constitute culture as they interact with
elements of native human nature. The fundamental postulate
of the discussion is that isolation of any one factor, no matter
how strong its workings at a given time, is fatal to understand-
ing and to intelligent action. Isolations have abounded, both
on the side of taking some one thing in human nature to be
a supreme “motive” and in taking some one form of social
activity to be supreme. Since the problem is here thought of as
that of the ways in which a great number of factors within and
without human nature interact, our task is to ask concerning
the reciprocal connections raw human nature and culture bear
to one another.

Franz Boas

Professor Emeritus of Anthropology , Columbia University

LIBERTY AMONG PRIMITIVE
PEOPLE

M ANY years ago, I lived alone with a tribe of Eski-
mos, I traveled about, generally accompanied by a
family with whom I had made friends, a man and
his wife. Sometimes I traveled alone for days on a dog sledge.
Those were days of the most joyful feeling of freedom, of
self-reliance: ready to meet the dangers of the ice, sea, and
wild animals 5 on the alert to meet and overcome difficulties;
no human being there to hinder or help. Still, there were
restraints that in the exuberance of youth I did not feel. Na-
ture interposed insurmountable obstacles to my plans. Food
had to be provided for myself and for the dogs. A dread dis-
ease had reduced the number of available dogs, which hindered
me from going where I wished. More than this, the very task
which took me to the Arctic, although freely chosen, was im-
posed upon me by the cultural pattern in which I had grown
up. My Eskimo friends wondered why I should choose to climb
mountains where there was no game, why I should gather up
useless plants and stones, and do other things that have no
sensible use in their lives. Maybe they thought that somebody,
or some strange compelling habit, made me do things that
could be understood only as due to compulsion, not to free
choice.

My Eskimo friends felt absolutely free. There was no one
to command them, no one to tell them what to do and what
not to do. They settled and hunted wherever they chose. The

FREEDOM

37 6

only restraints felt by them were those imposed by the forces
of nature; but my observation of their habits showed me how
subject they were to the rigorous demands of custom. They
were not allowed free choice of their food; the hunter had to
observe the strictest regulations to secure success; sickness and
death in a family disturbed the regular life of the whole com-
munity in which it occurred; the breach of customary observ-
ances by a single individual was believed to affect the life of
everyone who came into contact with the transgressor; in short,
I found their freedom restricted at every step. Still, their cus-
toms were to them so natural, so self-evident, and the only
possible way of living known to them, that they were not felt
as a restraint of freedom.

The life of the Eskimo as seen from my point of view as
well as my life seen from the Eskimo point of view was not
free, for objective observation from the point of view of one
culture shows the restraints imposed by life in another type of
culture. At the same time, the individual who is thoroughly
in harmony with the culture in which he lives does not feel
these restraints and will feel free.

Freedom is a concept that has meaning only in a subjective
sense. A person who is in complete harmony with his culture
feels free. He accepts voluntarily the demands made upon
him. He does not feel them as imposed upon him. They are
his natural reactions to the events of daily life. Obedience to
a ruler, law, or custom is not exacted but rendered freely.

For this reason, the concept of freedom can develop only
in those cases where there are conflicts between the individual
and the culture in which he lives. The more uniform the cul-
ture, that is, the more intensely all the individuals of a com-
munity are subject to the same customs, the stronger will be
the feeling of lack of restraint.

Nevertheless, one form of subjection may be felt in a cul-
turally uniform society: the impotence of man against fate,
against fate as determined by the forces of nature, by super-
natural powers, or by predestination.

We may call those cultures primitive in which little differ-
entiation between classes has developed. Even in those groups

FRANZ BOAS

377

In which the mode of life of everyone is practically the same,
where everyone has to obtain sustenance in the same manner
by his own efforts, where no economic classes exist, except
those developed by different degrees of ability to provide for
one’s needs, there are differences according to sex and age,
but these are so deeply embodied in the cultural pattern that
in the course of everyday life they are seldom felt as restric-
tions of freedom. Although in most cultures of this type chil-
dren are generally treated with great indulgence, there will
always be cases in which they are disciplined and compelled to
obey until in the course of their individual development they
become completely assimilated to the culture of the tribe.

Still, in a loosely organized society like the one just de-
scribed, individual tyrants may occur, individuals of unusual
strength, skill, and will power who interfere with the lives
of their fellow-tribesmen. Such are the “strong men” of the
Chukchee and Eskimo who tyrannize a village until the people
rise against them, do away with them, and free themselves of
the fear of their torturers.

More complex societies embrace classes with different privi-
leges and functions, and different standards of behavior. The
relations between the classes may be so institutionalized that
the restraints imposed upon each of them are accepted as a
“natural” arrangement. When the privileged group is felt as
a valuable asset for the whole community the lower class may
be eager to protect and to maintain its privileges, in a way
quite similar to conditions in feudal times, or in modern mon-
archies. An example of this kind occurs among certain Indians
of British Columbia. Although the people have to pay tribute
to the chief, the possession of a respected chief’s family is
valued so highly that the people rise against a chief who weak-
ens his own family by causing the death of his successor.

The consciousness of restraint, and hence the concept of
freedom, cannot arise where there is no conflict between the
wishes of the individual and his freedom of action. He must
be conscious of a freedom of choice. As long as he feels that
there is no possible mode of behavior except that prescribed

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378

by social custom which keeps his activities in standard bounds,
there can be no concept of freedom.

Interference with the freedom of action or the personal
comfort of an individual by fellow-tribesmen may occur even
in the simplest societies. Such interference is generally based
on personal conflicts. Two individuals may strive for posses-
sion of the same object. If the customs of the community per-
mit, the conflict may be decided by combat between the antago-
nists and may also involve their friends. Unfriendly gossip
may create a condition against which the individual cannot
successfully contend and which limits his freedom of action
within the social group. In some forms of culture opportunity
is given to him to free himself at least partly by a show of
valor or power which silences the gossip for a while, in others
he is entirely at the mercy of his personal enemies without
any means of redress. Such conflicts between individuals, or
between individuals and society as a whole, or between groups
unfriendly to each other, may encroach seriously upon the free-
dom of the individual.

Unless personal conflicts are regulated in some way by cus-
tom, they are liable to disrupt society. In many primitive socie-
ties customary law which restrains excesses of hostility between
individuals holds these disruptive forces in check. In more com-
plex societies law regulates the rights of individuals and checks
license.

The problem of freedom is different when the wishes of an
individual go counter to the customary behavior of the com-
munity, for instance when a couple desire to marry against the
strict rules of choice of mates. In such a case it is not only the
disapproval of the community or the forcible method by which
such a marriage is prevented that affects those concerned, but
even more the restraint of their freedom of choice, enforced
by a custom rejected by them.

Only when this revolt against custom occurs can a feeling for
the meaning of intellectual freedom develop. In primitive so-
ciety, this conflict is rare. Passionate love between man and
woman who belong to groups forbidden to intermarry is about
as rare as in our society passionate love between brother and

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379

sister, father and daughter, or mother and son. Obviously the
traditional mores exert a strong restraining influence upon the
wishes of the individual.

It is, however, certain that intellectual freedom is not en-
tirely absent even in societies in which rigid dogmatic belief
pervades the whole life. Among tribes in which the life-
histories of individuals are known in some detail, we find dis-
believers who disregard sacred teachings and who come into
conflict with their fellow-tribesmen. More frequently we find
those given to speculation who develop or reform the tribal
dogma. It would be difficult to understand the complex cere-
monial life and the systematic mythology of many peoples if
we did not assume that priests or other thinkers have shaped a
heterogeneous mass of ceremonial actions, myths, and religious
teachings into a more or less consistent whole. A communal
growth of such phenomena without individual initiative is
unthinkable. More than this, primitive cultures the history of
which we do not know appear to us as stable, frozen 5 but this
impression is erroneous. All cultures are in a state of flux, slow
among primitive groups, rapid when differentiation reaches a
higher degree. Whatever the stimulus may be that brings about
changes, it can become manifest only through the thoughts and
actions of individuals whose concepts deviate from the cultural
norm of their time. In this sense they are free, so far as they
modify the existing forms. When no outer forces break the con-
tinuity of tribal life, the changes are generally slight. Not so
when the life of the people undergoes violent changes. This
may be observed most readily in the contact between primi-
tive cultures and European civilization, when intertribal war-
fare is suppressed, new products of our industry are imported,
and new standards of life and thought are observed. Under
these conditions we see new ideas develop that are neither the
old nor the new, but a result of the interaction of both.

Similar observations may be made in the study of art. In
a stable society the artist is bound to a traditional style, not
absolutely, as is proved by the development of local styles in
each art area and wherever we can trace historical changes in
style. With the introduction of new art forms and new tech-

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niques, radical changes may develop which are due to the free
inventive genius of gifted individuals.

With all this, the concept of freedom is not found in primi-
tive society. The individual, on account of the lack of knowl-
edge of diverse forms of thought and action, cannot form by
himself the concept of something new, not intimately con-
nected with the range of his experience, and, therefore, the
possibility of a free choice does not exist. We believe that we
have such freedom and are not aware of our own limitations
founded on our participation in our culture, which does not
permit us to feel its limitations. In this sense we may say that
absolute freedom does not exist. We are free in so far as the
limitations of our culture do not oppress us; we are unfree
when we become conscious of these limitations and are no
longer willing to submit to them. This is true, no matter
whether the constraint put upon us is due to our subjection
to individuals or to the manifold restraints that law and custom
impress upon us.

Albert Einstein

Professor of Theoretical Physics and Member of the Institute
for Advanced Study , Princeton , New Jersey

FREEDOM AND SCIENCE 1

I

AT first glance it seems that freedom and science do not
JLjL have much relation to one another. In any case free-
jL JLdom may well exist without science, that is, to the
extent that man can live without science, man in whom the
impulse of inquiry is innate. But what of science without free-
dom?

Above all a man of science requires inward freedom, for he
must needs endeavor to free himself from prejudices and must
constantly convince himself anew, when new facts emerge, that
what has been established, however authoritatively, is still
valid. Intellectual independence is thus a primary necessity for
the scientific inquirer. But political liberty is also extraordinar-
ily important for his work. He must be able to utter what seems
true to him without concern about or danger to his life and
livelihood. This is apparent in historical investigations, but it
is a vital precondition for all scientific activity however remote
from politics. If certain books are condemned and made inacces-
sible in so far as their author is not acceptable to the govern-
ment on account of his political orientation or race, as is largely
the case today, the inquirer cannot attain an adequate basis on
which to build. And how can the building stand if it lacks a
secure foundation?

- 1 Translated from the German by James Gutmann, Professor of Philosophy,
Columbia University.

381

FREEDOM

382

It is self-evident that absolute freedom is an ideal which
cannot be realized in our social and political life. But all men
of good will should seek to guard mankind’s effort to realize
this ideal in ever increasing measure.

II

I know that it is a hopeless undertaking to debate about
fundamental value judgments. For instance if someone ap-
proves, as a goal, the extirpation of the human race from the
earth, one cannot refute such a viewpoint on rational grounds.
But if there is agreement on certain goals and values, one can
argue rationally about the means by which these objectives
may be attained. Let us, then, indicate two goals which may
well be agreed upon by nearly all who read these lines.

1 . Those instrumental goods which should serve to maintain
the life and health of all human beings should be produced by
the least possible labor of all.

2. The satisfaction of physical needs is indeed the indispen-
sable precondition of a satisfactory existence, but in itself it is
not enough. In order to be content men must also have the
possibility of developing their intellectual and artistic powers
to whatever extent accords with their personal characteristics
and abilities.

The first of these two goals requires the promotion of all
knowledge relating to the laws of nature and the laws of social
processes, that is, the promotion of all scientific endeavor. For
scientific endeavor is a natural whole the parts of which mu-
tually support one another in a way which, to be sure, no one
can anticipate. However, the progress of science presupposes
the possibility of unrestricted communication of all results and
judgments — freedom of expression and instruction in all
realms of intellectual endeavor. By freedom I understand social
conditions of such a kind that the expression of opinions and
assertions about general and particular matters of knowledge
will not involve dangers or serious disadvantages for him who
expresses them. This freedom of communication is indispen-
sable for the development and extension of scientific knowl-

ALBERT EINSTEIN

383

edge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first
instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot
secure freedom of expression 3 in order that every man may
present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tol-
erance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external lib-
erty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremit-
tingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative think-
ing in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.

If the second goal, that is, the possibility of the spiritual
development of all individuals, is to be secured, a second kind
of outward freedom is necessary. Man should not have to work
for the achievement of the necessities of life to such an extent
that he has neither time nor strength for personal activities.
Without this second kind of outward liberty, freedom of ex-
pression is useless for him. Advances in technology would pro-
vide the possibility of this kind of freedom if the problem of a
reasonable division of labor were solved.

The development of science and of the creative activities of
the spirit in general requires still another kind of freedom,
which may be characterized as inward freedom. It is this free-
dom of the spirit which consists in the independence of thought
from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudices as
well as from unphilosophical routinizing and habit in general.
This inward freedom is an infrequent gift of nature and a
worthy objective for the individual. Yet the community can
do much to further this achievement, too, at least by not inter-
fering with its development. Thus schools may interfere with
the development of inward freedom through authoritarian in-
fluences and through imposing on young people excessive spir-
itual burdens, on the other hand schools may favor such free-
dom by encouraging independent thought. Only if outward
and inner freedom are constantly and consciously pursued is
there a possibility of spiritual development and perfection and
thus of improving man’s outward and inner life.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Ethnologist ; Geographer; Past President of the Explorers* Club

WAS LIBERTY INVENTED?

I T is common to praise the ancient Greeks. They were the
first this and the greatest that. Pelion upon Ossa and coals
to Newcastle may well take a back seat to lauding the
Hellenes. They have been so long touted, and with so much
ingenuity, that it is a triumph if we can add a leaf to their
garland. In this the currently popular historians who deal with
the genesis and development of human institutions may have
succeeded, to judge from a 1939 article by Professor Hyde. 1
The Greeks, he says, invented liberty. He does not give a year
to the invention but dates it earlier than the siege of Troy,
which may have been around 1200 b . c .

Dr. Hyde’s view, taken seriously, is depressing if we apply
it to the chronology of Bishop Ussherj for then we have had
liberty among us for half our career since Eden, and have not
been getting far with it.

But naturally Professor Hyde ignores the Bishop and uses
instead, or at least implies, the time scale of the paleontolo-
gists and the anthropologists 5 whereupon liberty, if discovered
in the second millennium b.c., will have been a human insti-
tution for only a tiny fraction of our human course 5 so that we
may well pat ourselves on the back for the progress we have
made in so short a time.

Professor Hyde does not define the term liberty except by

1 Walter Woodburn Hyde, “The Origin of Liberty,” Scientific Monthly ,
Vol. XLVIII (1939;, pp. 519 S.

: -V384;- : :

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 385

saying he uses it “in our sense of the word. 53 The authorities he
cites to prove that liberty was absent from the empires of the
Nile Valley, the Fertile Crescent, and that general neighbor-
hood are conventional. The article, though brief, does make
a sufficient case that liberty “in our sense of the word 33 was
absent from those countries during the two or three millen-
niums that immediately preceded the Trojan war.

It runs through Professor Hyde’s discussion not merely that
he himself thinks liberty was invented but that he takes for
granted his readers will agree with him. He is a distinguished
historian and is, therefore, surely familiar with a large body of
the most respected historical writing. So it would appear that
the historians as a class, or at a minimum the school to which
Professor Hyde belongs, assume that liberty, when first upon
the earth, had just been discovered by some human individual
or by some group of humans. To an anthropologist, or at least
my variety, this permits a startling inside view of a sister dis-
cipline which we had supposed to be congenial with our own.

But perhaps we should not be startled; conflicts between dis-
ciplines are numerous in the history of science. For instance,
those with college four decades behind them can remember
classrooms in the same building, or at least on the same campus,
where astronomers would not give the sun more than ten mil-
lion years while the geologists were explaining that the earth
required at least a hundred million.

A current sample of like conflict between sciences is the one
between anthropology and dietetics as to whether a wholly
nonvegetal diet permits good health; more specifically as to
whether it contains enough Vitamin C to prevent scurvy. Here
the contradictions are flung back and forth just about as they
were in the i 900 3 s between the geologists and the astronomers.
Teaching in the same universities, issuing books through the
same publishers, the protagonists have been challenging each
other on several points, three of which we mention.

First, the dietitians make the broad claim that exclusively
carnivorous food does not contain enough Vitamin C for opti-
mum health, while the anthropologists support the equally
broad contrary thesis that multitudes of people belonging to

FREEDOM

386

several races are known to have lived indefinitely in good
average health on a diet wholly carnivorous.

More narrowly (and hedging somewhat) the dietitians have
also been saying that if it is at all possible to avoid scurvy upon
a nonvegetal diet, then it must be through the eating of the
whole animal, particularly the “organs rich in Vitamin C”
(liver, etc.). Squarely against this has been the teaching of the
anthropologists that the typical hunter (at least in the north-
ern third of North America) will have a dog team, and that
instead of feeding one whole animal to his family and another
whole one to his dogs he will divide each, giving those parts
to the dogs which the family least covets. The records of in-
numerable travelers and other reporters show these less cov-
eted portions, among most if not all hunting tribes, to include
most of those organs which the dietitians have called rich in
Vitamin C So the dietitians are telling us that on such a food
division as practiced by, for instance, the northern Canadian
Eskimos and the Athapascans, the people will develop scurvy,
but that the dogs will remain in good health; while the anthro-
pologists are declaring that both men and dogs are known to
have under Eskimo and Athapasca food division good pros-
pects of average health, and in particular that neither family
nor teams will develop scurvy.

The last of our sample contradictions is: The dietitians con-
tend that those who want to remain healthy for long periods
exclusively on flesh foods must not merely eat the whole ani-
mal but must also see to it that a large part of their food is
consumed raw or underdone. Here the countervailing state-
ment of the anthropologist is that although some exclusively
carnivorous people, such as the Eskimos, do cook their meat
on the average less than we do, there are other wholly carniv-
orous people, such as the northerly Athapascans, who are me-
ticulous about cooking— so much so that early travelers found
them horrified by the sight of Europeans devouring underdone
roasts and steaks.

We anthropologists know of many such conflicts with other
sciences as we have with dietetics; but, speaking I know for

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 387

more than just myself, I had no suspicion until reading the
article by Professor Hyde that my discipline would look upon
as obviously false what historians look upon as obviously true,
and in such deep concerns of man as those which relate to social
restraints and to freedom from them.

For apparently the historians take as axiomatic that freedom
must have been invented by some man or group of men, while
we feel that it cannot have been invented by humans since we
must have had it already while in the process of growing hu-
man. They seem to take the absence of liberty as a natural
early human condition 5 the invention, discovery, or first devel-
opment of it as necessarily related to a “high” civilization, to
one where abstract thought and broad generalization, as well
as notable ingenuity and originality, had been developed. We
on the other hand take as basic that early man, at least for some
time after he began to fit the present definitions of homo> was
living under a freedom broader than has ever been described
by non-Utopian writers that deal with Greece.

We anthropologists feel, then, that the abridgment of lib-
erty, and not liberty, is a human invention. We concede that
the Greeks may have reinvented or rediscovered liberty, and
that they probably did; but we deny the possibility that they
could have been its inventors or discoverers.

Since there appear to be such fundamental differences be-
tween historical and anthropological thought upon liberty and
the abridgments of liberty, it may be well to present an anthro-
pological view in a book for which these themes are the gen-
eral topics. For contrast, or at least for an introduction, we
give the historian’s view, as presented through the Scientific
Monthly by Dr. Hyde.

The fact that we Americans enjoy liberty while we imagine cer-
tain other nations do not, and the ever present fear that we may
conceivably lose it ourselves, shows that we regard its acquisition as
a human achievement somewhere in the past. Few of us, however,
realize when the idea first appeared on earth and imagine that in
some form or other it has always been here, at least since mankind
began to be civilized. But we shall see that this is a fallacy and that

FREEDOM

388

long periods of civilized man passed without it, and that liberty was
evolved late in historical times by one and only one great people —
the ancient Greeks.

With this and more for an introduction, Dr. Hyde proceeds
to a description of the cultures south and east of the Mediter-
ranean and in the Mediterranean for the millenniums just
before the Trojan war, continuing down to the period of the
highest development of such freedom as the Greeks had. There
is a parallel synopsis of histories. As we have said, a good case
is made out for the absence of liberty "as we understand it”
from those great empires of the Mediterranean world which
are chiefly familiar to us, the Egyptians and the successive
powers of the Fertile Crescent down to the Persians, with
references to various other countries and powers — among them
Crete, Phoenicia, Palestine, and Macedonia.

Coming back to the Greeks of his introductory paragraphs
Dr. Hyde presents his claims for them as the first people who
ever had liberty. The statement is forceful, and no doubt log-
ical upon such premises as historians of that school keep at the
back of their minds. We give a not unfair, although perhaps
inadequate, summary through quotations. Some of these are
divided by only a few lines of text while others have paragraphs
between them.

... To have “invented” liberty, as I like to term it, is, to my
mind, the greatest thing the Greeks did or could have done, beside
which all their other achievements in thought, art and literature,
however remarkable, were secondary. . . .

. . . We first see the idea [of liberty] dimly adumbrated in the
council of chiefs before Troy as described by Homer, but the germ
was older, doubtless brought into the peninsula of Greece from the
grasslands of the Danube by the ancestors of the historical Greeks
who perfected it. . . .

Those who write today about Greek liberty depend for
their material chiefly upon what the Greeks wrote, and then
upon what others have written about them. From this type of
study there come, no doubt usually, results as given by Pro-
fessor Hyde, among them that:

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 389

* . . Freedom also kept the Greeks from tabus and asceticism, for
their religion allowed them a sane use of nature’s gifts. Their mo-
rality, like other features of their lives, was governed by “modera-
tion.” Greek ethics was a social and not a religious phenomenon,
. . . There was no divine sanction to their rules of conduct, . . .
Their simple ethics freed them from any deep sense of sin or fanati-
cism for unattainable perfection. The Greek accepted life, lived here
and now, and was little concerned with doctrines of immortality.
He hated death as much as we Christians do — but for a different
reason. He hated it, but did not fear it.

These deductions confirm us in that when the historians
use liberty “in our sense of the word/ 7 they are really using
it as the anthropologists do. Take my own case, for instance.
In several of my books, among them Hunters of the Great
Nor th } My Life with the Eskimo , and a chapter which I con-
tributed to the volume 1 Believe y I have said about the Eskimos
that they had liberty and also that they had most if not all of
the things which Professor Hyde tells us about the Greeks —
the only hedging that might be required here would be on
taboo. But, perhaps through not being familiar with the his-
torical point of view, it did not occur to me to attribute all such
things among the Eskimos to Eskimo liberty, as Professor
Hyde attributes them among the Greeks to Greek liberty.

The Greeks had the things Professor Hyde names, and they
also had liberty ; the Eskimos had the same things, and they
had liberty. There is, then, nothing in the compared or con-
trasted results of the students of the Greeks and of the Eskimos
that is incompatible with the idea that the traits above described,
among others, may coexist with liberty.

From such works as the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences
it will appear, I now realize, that Professor Hyde’s conception
of the origin and nature of liberty is well known and has been
printed frequently. We may, then, consider that the case for
the Greeks has been sufficiently stated. On that assumption we
proceed to a discussion of liberty as it is found among the
most primitive peoples of today — those farthest back on that
scale which runs from Iron Age through Bronze and Neolithic
to Middle^ Old Stone, and Pre-Stone. We take our descrip-

FREEDOM

39 °

tions naturally from those men of today who combine the qual-
ities of being in their own culture farthest back from the Iron
Age and of being, through reasons of geography, history, and
the like, most nearly uninfluenced by contemporary “high”
cultures. For me it is convenient to depend chiefly upon the
Eskimos, for they fit our specifications and I happen to know
them through having lived with them many years as one of
themselves.

Like Professor Hyde for the Greeks, we find it difficult
for the Eskimo case to discuss liberty, as it were, in a vacuum.
So we give a background sketch of their lives. We have to
make it perhaps a little more detailed than Professor Hyde
does, for he presents his argument to readers whom he knows
to be familiar with Greek history and culture; we must pre-
sent ours to an audience most of whom we know to be un-
familiar with the corresponding aspects of life and nature
among the Eskimos.

We need in fact also a brief general introduction to our
statement.

Liberty of course has a meaning chiefly in relation to its
opposite, the abridgment of liberty. Biologists say that liberty
has been abridged by certain animals, among them ants; but
it has not been similarly contended that abridgments of free-
dom have been discovered among the animals biologically
nearest man, his cousins (if not his ancestors) the apes.

By average scientific opinion, we have been human at least
a million years. For ultraconservatism, bring that estimate
down to a hundred thousand; still man had run more than
nine-tenths of his human course long before the siege of Troy.
So far as the mere chances are concerned, this is plenty of time
for the development of that curtailment of liberty which most
of us agree was found in Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, and the
rest of those countries during the millenniums immediately
before Christ.

The Andaman Islanders, the Tasmanians, the Tierra del
Fuegans, and the Eskimos had, all of them, spent the same
90,000 years with the same opportunity for devising institu-
tions that fetter liberty.

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 39 I

American anthropologists, at a congress in 1939, passed a
resolution by what the newspapers said was a unanimous vote
to the effect that if there are pronounced intellectual differ-
ences between races then we have not as yet discovered what
they are. A priori, then, the ancestors of the four groups we have
named might, any or all of them, have developed such tech-
niques for abridging liberty as chattel or wage slavery. It is
equally true that, having developed the curtailment of free-
dom to any conceivable degree, they might have gone into a
reverse cycle — they might have rediscovered liberty, as the
ancestors of the Greeks also might have and may have 10,000,
30,000 or 70,000 years before Troy.

On a basis of mere logic you would think that, with many
different cultures in the world at the time of Columbus, a
factual survey of the globe might have discovered a highest
degree of servitude among one people, a highest develop-
ment of liberty with another, and various grades between in
various other countries or cultures. Those of high average free-
dom in 1492 might have been the descendants of a group who,
one or two thousand years earlier, had a low freedom ratio $
and the reverse with other groups.

What we have just stated may be called the anthropological
view. In essence it is that abridgments of liberty tend to in-
crease, both in variety and degree, as you move from simple
to complex social conditions, from cultures that are “low” to
those that are “high.” There is an opposed popular view, that
liberty goes with “advanced” culture. Then there ought to be
most liberty in some such place as a university center, like
Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Ann Arbor, Michigan, and least
in whatever part of the world is most remote culturally from
these standards. If we could discover contemporaneous with
our university communities others that conform to our usual
descriptions of the “Stone Age,” we should (by this view)
find a community where freedom was abridged a great deal
more than in Cambridge.

Now it did happen to me that, after being a teaching fellow
and a sort of instructor in anthropology at Harvard, I went

FREEDOM

392

from Cambridge to live with a Stone Age community and had
a chance for a firsthand comparison of their liberties.

We of the United States were not as freedom-conscious when
I left Cambridge in 1906 as most people there and elsewhere
in the United States were in 1936. However, we had all re-
cited in school Burns on chains and slavery and Patrick Henry
on the choice between liberty and death. Back in the sixth grade
I was as convinced of the wrongness of British Colonial taxa-
tion as any of my Wall Street friends are today of the inequity
of New Deal taxes. So I was, even in 1900, freedom-conscious
to a degree. On my second Arctic expedition in 1910, about
the first mental comparisons I made between the university
town at the mouth of the Charles and the Eskimo villages at
the mouth of the Coppermine were some bearing upon free-
dom.

It is not necessary here to prove that my associates in Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts, were of an “advanced” culture. It is
necessary to explain, at least briefly, the life in Coronation
Gulf to bring out the distance in social institutions between an
American college town and a Stone Age community.

A description of the culture of those Eskimos with whom
I lived first during the year 19x0-11 gives practically our
definition of the “lowest savagery.” They had no food except
the tissues of animals. They used fire for cooking, as man is
thought to have done in every land of the earth through many
decades of centuries. They dressed exclusively in skins, as the
ancestors of the North Europeans are believed to have done
when England and France were in their ice ages. They used
copper extensively, but merely hammered and ground into
shape. For their stone implements and weapons they did not
use the elaborate chipping by which we know the Late and
Middle Stone Ages, and were thus in the Old Stone Age. In-
deed, it has been suggested by T. A. Rickard, a student of the
implements and weapons of ancient man, author of Mm and
Metals and numerous similar works, that the Coronation Gulf
Eskimos were in a cultural period earlier than any of the proper
Stone Ages.

The Gulf people made fire by striking together lumps of

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 393

pyrite and, if they had to, by friction of wood on wood. They
lived during summer in tents of undressed skins 5 during win-
ter in houses of snow. Their only domestic animal was the dog,
their only vehicles the sled and skin boat. For caribou and
bears they used spears; for these and other animals they used
the bow and arrow; for the seal they used harpoons. Their fuel
was the fat of animals and so was their light.

Under their Stone Age way of life, these Eskimos were
neither pathetic in our eyes, when we had become used to liv-
ing with them, nor were they wretched in their own. They liked
winter better than summer and were glad the summers, with
stifling heat and swarms of biting insects, were brief. They
liked the seacoast better than the treeless prairie inland; but
they liked that prairie better than the woods farther south,
to which they resorted only when they needed material for
sledges or implements. They believed themselves to have a
better country than the forest Indians, and were correct in that
so far as I could judge, for I have lived with those Indians and
they were, both in their own eyes and mine, a wretched people,
starving more often than the Eskimos. They shivered a hun-
dred times more, for they were as badly protected from the
cold as the Eskimos were well protected — they had never de-
veloped a culture really suited to their environment, while the
Eskimo culture seemed to me nearly perfect in its time and
place, yielding a sense of stable security and ministering to
comfort.

The Gulf Eskimos were not merely satisfied with their coun-
try and climate but also with nearly everything else. They
considered meat, the tissues of animals, the finest diet in the
world; they had plenty of it and were in good health on it,
the best I have seen anywhere. That animals should eat vege-
tation and that people should eat the animals seemed to them
not merely normal but desirable. They were so dressed and
housed that, to judge from my experience when clothed and
living similarly, they were more comfortable in winter than
people usually are in New York or London. They were more
free from skin troubles than we, although (or because) they
knew not soap or towels and never bathed. They never washed,

FREEDOM

394

but their faces looked as clean as ours. Their body odors were
less conspicuous than ours, no doubt in part through a Mon-
golian nature that is less smelly than the European, but also
I think because their clothes did not capture and store up body
secretions as do our fibrous undergarments. There were strong
smells in their dwellings but they were smells of foods which
are liked — no one finds very reprehensible the smell of a cheese
if he likes its taste, and certainly we do not ordinarily find
distasteful the odors of steaming coffee or grilled bacon.

The foregoing is a personal statement. In the literature
concerning primitive Eskimos there are two diametrically op-
posed views, that they are the happiest people in the world
and that they are the most wretched. A fair analysis will usually
show that those who call them wretched mean that the writers
think they would themselves be wretched if they were living
Eskimo style ; while those who call the Eskimos happy are
judging objectively, by laughter and smiles and signs of con-
tentment.

Of course there are unhappy people in Eskimo Land as
there is wretchedness in Merrie England. What those mean
who say the Eskimos are happy is that the average of happi-
ness seems to be greater than what the travelers are used to
when at home.

But we are supposed to discuss here not happiness but free-
dom, and these are not inevitably synonymous.

There are, of course, many sorts of liberty. The first, chron-
ologically, is in a child’s relation to parents and to other grown-
ups. On this the travelers vary from saying that Eskimo chil-
dren are never punished to saying that they are seldom pun-
ished, or less often than in other countries. A part of this free-
dom from punishment is freedom from restraint. Among the
forest Indians, just to the south of Coronation Gulf, infants
are strapped to a board much of the time during their first
year. Our children are in cribs and cradles. The Eskimo child
crawls around on the floor with a lack of restraint which, at
the least, is not common among us. Our children do not get
what they cry for unless we think it good for them. When the
Eskimo child wants something he usually gets it, whether

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 395

from our point of view it is good for him or not. To be con-
crete, when a two-year old child wants the scissors he is almost
certain not to get them with us and almost certain to get them
with the Eskimos . 2

There is a like relative difference between most of a
child’s other freedoms when we compare Eskimo ways to ours.
During the period of youth our children are told what to do,
and so are the young Eskimos ; but with the important differ-
ence that the punishment of recalcitrants may be and frequently
is both mental and physical with us but can be only mental with
the Eskimos— bad children suffer both disapproval and spank-
ing with us; with the Eskimos there are no spankings or slaps
but only the disapproval of family and associates.

In theory, marriages are equally free with us and with the
Eskimos; they are upon the advice of parents and friends or
on personal inclination in both cases. In practice the freedom
of marrying whom you like is somewhat greater with the
Eskimos. Subsequent to marriage, their freedom is definitely
greater. With us the parents of a young couple are, on both
sides, expected to advise them that the union should be perma-
nent or at least should be continued for a time. With the Cor-
onation Gulf Eskimos it did occur that parents advised either
the young husband or the young wife; but this was bad form,
meeting the disapproval of the community. And certainly there
were many cases where a couple separated without anyone
advising them against doing so — it was not considered the
affair of either parents or friends.

With us the desired mate is free to say no to a proposal; that
is so, too, among the Eskimos. With us freedom of saying no
disappears with marriage, and we are expected to sympathize
with the one who prefers to continue the union. With the Es-
kimos, after marriage as before, the sympathy of the commu-
nity is with the one who is unwilling. A woman, or man either,
has just as much right to refuse the continuance of a marriage
as to refuse entering upon it.

2 On why Eskimo children are allowed to play with scissors, and why their
general freedom is more than that of our children, see, for instance, the
author’s My Life with the Eskimo , pp. 395-403.

FREEDOM

396

Among the Eskimos, as with us, differences of personality
are such that in one family the man has his way usually, in
another the woman. We have a theory, however, that the man
should control, usually or always; that the woman should have
her way seldom or never. The Eskimos make no such distinc-
tion between husband and wife; neither is supposed to have
any authority over the other. It is no more improper for the
woman to be the stronger character than for the man to be.

From what we have just said follows the absurdity of stories
that “primitive” Eskimo husbands lend their wives to other
men. This can be true, and is true, only among those Eskimos
who are no longer “primitive” but who have adopted the white
man’s religion and customs to that extent which makes wife-
lending possible. The wife-lenders, then, are Eskimos who
have surrendered their own belief that man and woman are
equal, each without authority over the other, and have taken
in its place a view based upon the Christian nuptial promise
of a woman that she will obey her husband and upon the Euro-
pean attitude that a man should be master in his own house.
This means, of course, that stories which you have read about
Greenland Eskimos lending their wives to white men may
very well be true; for, after all, those Eskimos have been in
close association with Danes, and with other Europeans, for
two hundred years. They began to adopt Christian marriage
vows, through the rule of the church, so many generations
ago that no doubt it seems to Greenlanders of today as if the
obedience of wives and the lending of them had always been
Greenland customs.

Sex jealousy, as we understand it, seemed unknown among
the Eskimos of Coronation Gulf as recently as 1910; it is said
to have become fairly common before 1930. During those
twenty years perhaps half or three-fourths of the five hundred
or so Coronation Eskimos had died off, through diseases intro-
duced by the whites, while their culture had been affected
materially by traders, missionaries, and particularly by Chris-
tian Eskimos who had moved in from the Mackenzie River
district of northwestern Canada and from Alaska. With these
whites and Christian Eskimos had come the wedding pledge

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 397

of obedience to the husband and the European idea that a man
is the head of a household, that a woman is a kind of prop-
erty, and that either husband or wife is disgraced by the a social
misconduct” of the other — especially that a man can be dis-
graced by what his wife does.

The Coronation Eskimos, like those who have been described
from other regions not strongly influenced by whites or Atha-
pascan, Algonquin, and other Indians, were communistic an-
archists. The kind and degree of their freedom will appear
through a discussion of their communism and of their anarchy.

That communism means nobody owning anything is, of
course, merely a device of polemics; or, if you like, any com-
munism is a modified communism. Stone Age Eskimos owned
certain things and did not own others.

In Coronation Gulf, land could not be owned. Neither could
it be in the Mackenzie region to the west. The question of
house ownership could not arise in the Gulf district, for there
cold- weather dwellings were of snow and thereby transient.
But in the Mackenzie, where houses were of earth and wood,
it could arise. We digress, therefore, to explain that in the
Mackenzie delta the builders owned a house as long as they
dwelt in it, but lost all title when they moved out. However,
there would necessarily grow up, and did grow up, a practical
definition of what was meant by moving out. A family known
to be on a journey, and to plan coming back, was looked upon
as still in the house. There was, however, a tacit requirement
that owners leave behind things to indicate they were coming
back. If it was winter, and if they expected to return before
spring, they would leave their belongings in the house and
would close the door. But if the absence was to include the
breakup, as between March, which is winter, and June, which
is summer, then they would leave goods in a depot outside; for
it is the nature of the Mackenzie houses that they leak and are
damp in spring, which has an unfortunate effect upon most
things that are Eskimo property.

If a family were planning to be away a whole year, and
were to try to keep the house vacant during that time by a
combination of leaving things in it and of asking that it be

FREEDOM

398

kept vacant, the conduct would be recognized as antisocial.
Persistence in antisocial conduct is practically inconceivable on
the Eskimo Stone Age cultural level. I have never heard from
them, or read of them in books, that an attempt was actually
made to keep a house vacant for more than a few weeks or
at most a few months. The normal thing, if you were moving
away, would be to think of somebody whom you liked, whose
house was not as good as yours, and to suggest that he and his
family be ready to move in when you move out. For it is recog-
nized that an occupant, whether the original builder of a house
or not, has at least such right over it that he could turn it over
upon leaving to anyone whom he liked who happened to
need it.

But the community would be the ultimate judge of whether
the friend needed the house. If it were obvious that he did
not need it, then (for the reasons we have mentioned, that in
primitive Eskimo society you do not go against public opin-
ion) the man who is starting on the journey would, to begin
with, make no suggestion to his friend about moving in; but
were he so callous to local feeling as to make the suggestion,
then his friend, unless equally callous, would decline. This is
another point on which we have no direct evidence — I have
neither heard of nor read about a case where anyone moved
into a vacated house unless his doing so met the approval of
the community.

The approval of an Eskimo group may, of course, depend on
friendships, or on personal liking, as with us; but in theory
always, and in practice at least usually, the community approval
of a family moving into a vacated house is based upon their
being known to need the house.

A Mackenzie River saying has it that “There is no more
sense in wanting a house that is too big for you than in wanting
a coat that is too big for you.” Therefore, a small family who
build a large house will invite a family they like to share it with
them. In practice, the wife has more of a say here than the
husband, for it will be the two women, with their children,
who constantly are at home while the men are out hunting.
But although congeniality between the women is of more im-

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 399

portance than between the men there may be a situation where
the decision rests with, or at least is based upon, the children.
If they are old enough they have strong preferences in play-
mates and will clamor that a family shall be invited which has
the right number and kind of children.

As this paper is being written come stories from England
which show that the Eskimo view of housing, never wholly
alien with us, is just now much to the fore.

A friend writes from southwestern England that in a way
he is lucky his country home is so small that obviously there
is room in it for no more than his own family. It seems there
is in his village a local committee which receives children that
have been evacuated from London, studies the housing facili-
ties of various homes in the district, studies also personal con-
genialities, and then by just such common-sense methods as
were used by the Eskimos of Mackenzie River decides upon
which householder the children shall be quartered. The chief
difference seems to be one of procedure. In England the matter
is formally determined by a committee formally chosen; among
the Eskimos the thing happens more informally, and as it were
naturally, for it is the entire community and not a selected
group which makes the decision. Nor do Eskimos have set con-
claves, like a New England town meeting or a Russian soviet.
They just talk things over informally when they happen to
meet — outdoors, within doors, in somebody’s home or in the
clubhouse. No vote is taken, but there develops a consensus of
opinion. This is based upon all the factors applicable, such as
whether given families are friends or strangers, whether the
children involved on both sides are of ages such that they will
play well together, whether a local family has no child and
will, for that reason, provide a specially desirable home.

Clearly things are not wholly formal in the British arrange-
ment. There is no doubt that, especially in small villages, public
sentiment gradually makes itself felt informally in Devon-
shire or Cornwall much as it does at Mackenzie River or Point
Barrow.

Land and houses considered, we turn next to food with the
Eskimos and take a special case to bring out a general view.

FREEDOM

400

There are two seals in Coronation Gulf, the a common” and
the bearded ; the common weighs usually less than a hundred
pounds, the bearded several hundred. A sealer who gets a
small one takes it to his wife, who skins it and cuts it up. She
keeps the skin for family use and so with the fat and the lean.
She may give some of the food uncooked to a neighbor, but
usually she cooks as much as the size of her pot allows, and
either invites the neighbors to join in a meal at her house or
sends portions of cooked food to families that are known to be
without fresh meat.

When a hunter secures a bearded seal he does not take it
home but stands on a small ice hummock with hands out-
stretched long enough to turn around three times slowly. All
hunters who see him doing this gather, and the most influential
of them cuts the seal into as many pieces as there are hunters
present. This master of ceremonies gets the second last piece;
so that he has been, to an extent, punished for being eminent,
just as the hunter, who gets the last piece, is punished for being
successful. However, in a community where no one lacks for
anything as long as anyone has something, this issue is really
academic.

The reward which the hunter gets for his success is that he
is the hero of the hour. He is like a football player who has
made a touchdown. If he consistently has better success in
getting large seals than do the other hunters, he is like a player
who can be relied on to make gains for his team whenever at
all possible.

It is a matter of detail and not of fundamentals that there
are different rules for the handling of common and bearded
seals. The end result is the same; the community shares with
approximate equality the benefit of any success.

We turn once more to Mackenzie River, and for an example
rather than a principle, when we tell of their fishing.

A large Mackenzie family with whom I lived the winter of
1906-07, at one stage twenty-three of us, had tons and tons of
fish accumulated by midwinter. Then the less successful hunters
and fishers began to come in from various districts. At first we
took them into our house; they ate our fish with us; their

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 40 I

women shared in the cooking and sewing; their men and some
of their women helped 11$ in fishing. When there was no more
room in our house the gathering hunters began to erect snow-
houses or other dwellings in a cluster around our house. The
fishing season was over, and we were getting only a few each
day. The inroads of people and dog teams upon the fish pile
were daily more noticeable; in a few weeks nearly all the fish
were gone. At that stage the custom is to load sledges to
capacity with the last of the fish and to scatter in various direc-
tions for hunting grounds that are supposed to be better. In
the Mackenzie district this usually worked, for I was not able
to learn that there had been a famine in the region within
the memory of anyone living, or within the survival of reliable
tradition.

As long as there was room, the visitors had as much right
as we to bunk in our house. When the houseroom was gone
the newcomers were, of course, free to build their own camps.
Everybody within our house or without it was as free to use
fish for men or dogs as we who had caught them. There was
no chance for the most prominent man in our family or for
anyone else to play Lord Bountiful. The people who gathered
around us did admire us for the activity and success with which
we had carried on the fishing; they acknowledged freely that
we had done much better than they. They admired us and they
liked us; but it was not in their way of thinking to be grateful
to us, except as a town is grateful to a civic leader or a school
to a winning ball team.

But we did have a slight degree of food ownership in the
fish catch. As said, no one had to ask permission to use our
fish locally nor did any have to ask permission for loading up
their sleds with “our” fish when the camp finally broke up; but
if a traveler came along who spent a day or two with us and
then passed on, he would have to ask for fish if he wanted to
take some away with him, and he would expect to pay — would
pay unless we who had caught the fish said to him specially
that we did not want pay.

This about freedom with dwellings and with fish in Mac-
kenzie River is said with diffidence, in that Eskimos there had

FREEDOM

402

been in touch with whites — off and on, remotely, for half a
century; then constantly and more intimately for the seventeen
years just before I spent with them the winter of 1906-07.
So their customs might have changed to some extent. I did,
however, question them searchingly on how things used to be,
finding evidence of change sometimes and no doubt occasionally
failing to discover proof of a change that really had taken
place. Therefore, we discuss here Mackenzie River only when
no sample of what we are trying to bring out is available from
Coronation Gulf. Otherwise this paper is based mainly upon
the Gulf Eskimos, some five hundred of whom had never seen
a white man before 1910, so they cannot have suffered much
change through European influence.

When a Coronation meal was being eaten you would not
join unless you were invited; but you were sure to be invited.
If your house was short of food you would not send a petition
to another house; but the people next door knew about as much
as you did about the food situation of your own family and
would not think of eating without either sending you a part
of their meal or else asking specially that you join them.
The only modification of this procedure was that instead of
sending a message to every house a woman might get one of
the children to run out and shout at the top of his voice that
they were about to eat. If people didn’t hear the shout it was
their misfortune, unless a neighbor took it upon himself to let
them know.

Freedom of visiting back and forth was controlled in these
Eskimo villages exactly as it is among us when we live in
friendly groups. In nothing is a child better trained than in
watching for signs of being not quite welcome. They learn
not to shout when anybody wants to sleep. They learn to go
outdoors when they notice that the house is getting too
crowded. It is not merely that public opinion is so strong that
no one resists it but also that everyone is taught to watch for
the slightest signs of individual or collective irritation.

There were in Coronation Gulf no men or women of author-
ity, but everyone had influence gauged by a lifetime of asso-
ciation. In a period of scarcity an outsider might get the impres-

VILHJALMXJR STEFANSSON 403

sion of authority when a man said he was going inland hunting
and everybody followed him 5 but if you knew the language
and understood the people you would realize that they fol-
lowed Brown rather than Jones because they thought his judg-
ment better — Brown led them only in the sense of being first
to announce that he would go 5 people followed because they
thought his to be a good lead. It was like getting a Wall Street
tip that a Napoleon of finance was buying a certain stock.

Not merely did the Eskimos have no chiefs but they had
no prisons or other forms of confinement, no floggings or
things of that sort. There were only two forms of punishment,
the disapproval of the community and death. Theoretically,
the death punishment was inflicted only for that crime which
is worst in the Eskimo calendar, troublemaking, and it should
not be inflicted until the community was unanimous, which,
in practice, meant years of discussion. The execution should
be by the nearest of kin, for then a blood feud would not arise.

We discuss the vendetta only as it bears on the degree of
freedom. The feud ought not to start, because a man who knew
he was being discussed for execution would move away to an-
other community. Having to do that is not as serious with them
as with us, for they own no houses or other property which by
its nature must be left behind ; they could take with them their
personal property. They would be welcome in another com-
munity even if it were known why they had come; a man would
have to develop a local unpopularity before falling in line for
execution.

In operation an Eskimo blood feud was similar to those of
Kentucky or Sicily, except that there was no concerted effort to
exterminate one of the two families involved — it was sufficient
for your family to be one ahead in the score of killings. A feud
usually closed by that family moving away which, at a given
time, was one ahead. If they moved far enough away, the feud
would die out.

The blood feud was no doubt the worst single element in the
Eskimo social organization, but it was not a problem related to
freedom or liberty, as these are usually understood. We have

FREEDOM

404

in fact described the feud chiefly to show that the question of
freedom is not involved.

We have said that small animals rather than big were handled
as if they were private property, but that in reality neither was
private property in our sense. We have said that land could not
be owned at all and that a house was not owned after our
manner of ownership. Portable articles, however, were owned
with the Coronation Eskimos in just our way. Their bows and
arrows were as much their private property as rifles and car-
tridges are with our sportsmen. They owned their knives,
spears, harpoons, fire implements, cooking pots — in fact, any-
thing and everything that could be carried with you on a sledge
or in a boat. And of course they owned sledges and boats as
we own our cars and our power launches. And whatever you
own you may sell, with the Stone Age Eskimos as with us.

Property obviously common to the whole family was never
sold by husband or wife unless both were in agreement. Mature
children in the family were consulted 3 young ones were not
consulted, but they were listened to tolerantly if they expressed
strong views, as through fondness of a dog or pride in a sleigh.
With dog trading especially, even a young child might have
considerable influence.

When the thing to be sold was clearly individual property,
as a man’s crooked knife or a woman’s case of needles, there
was also consultation at least of husband and wife 5 but this was
looked upon more as a courtesy than a necessity. It was rare
that either discouraged the sale of a thing which naturally was
in the province of the other.

There was in our Stone Age community a recognized scale
of prices, but it was also recognized that a special case may
bring out a new value. A dog may have a standard price of
two six-inch copper knives 5 but everybody will appreciate your
being willing to exchange a dog for one knife, or even two dogs
for one knife, if you have many dogs and are in special need
of a knife. If you have nothing with which to buy a knife or a
dog, your chances among Eskimo friends of receiving them as
presents are about the same as with us among our friends. And,
just as among us, you might take the knife or dog as a present

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 405

but would say to yourself, or even say aloud, that you expected
to pay when you were able.

We have not given a complete view of freedom among the
Stone Age Eskimos of Coronation Gulf, and cannot do so, for
this is a chapter and not a whole book. But the examples we
have taken are fair. We might add a few things, as a mere
recital. Children are free to do, if they can, the work of grown
people; the grown may play children’s games, by themselves
or with the children, and not lose caste. Men may do women’s
work and women men’s work. One or a few women may travel
with many men, one or a few men with many women. When
people are eating in two groups there may be all men in one
and all women in the other; but usually there is the same num-
ber of persons in each group, so that if there are fewer women
in the party there may be two or three men eating with the
women.

Coronation Gulf had no exceptions to sex equality, but excep-
tions are known from the far west and far east. In Greenland,
for instance, the rowing of the big boats was done by women,
the steering by a man. Apparently there was something in the
nature of disgrace to a man in having to row with the women.

This does not mean that there was no division of work. For
obvious and mainly biological reasons the women looked after
the children, kept house, and did the chief work of the camp,
while the men hunted. There was no more disgrace, however,
or impropriety, in a woman’s hunting than there is with us in a
woman’s driving a car or piloting an airplane. If a man stayed
home and looked after the children while the wife went hunt-
ing, it was always for a natural reason — that he was lame, that
he was recovering from an illness, that he was snowblind, or
something of that sort. You never say to a man that it is too
bad he has to look after the children; what you say, and feel,
is that his being lame is unfortunate.

It is not possible to find among Homer’s, Plato’s, or any
other Greeks an approach to such complete liberty as there was
among the Stone Age Eskimos of Coronation Gulf. The liberty
was similar among all those Eskimos whom I have visited who

FREEDOM

406

were near enough to “savagery” so that 1 felt I could rely on
what they were telling me about former days.

There seem, indeed, to be no writings for any part of the
world, except perhaps a few of those on Utopias, which have
ever described a human society that had more kinds of liberty
or higher degrees of them than we found in 1910 among the
Eskimos of Coronation Gulf.

With the Indians next south, the northerly Athapascans, lib-
erty was on nearly as high a level when I was with them at
various times between 1906 and 1912.

Roughly speaking, and of course with numerous exceptions,
there was in North America a decrease of pre-Columbian lib-
erty as you went south from its north coast, an increase of the
infringements on some or most of the different liberties, until
you came to a maximum of infringement, a minimum of lib-
erty, in what we now call Mexico and Central America.

Again with numerous exceptions, the march southward, away
from the Eskimos and from liberty, coincided with an advance
upon districts of higher and higher culture, or at least of cul-
tures which we speak of as higher.

Not alone in the New World but throughout the whole
world it appears to be a rule, if not a law, that infractions upon
liberty grow as communities grow, whether the community
growth be in numbers, in culture, or in both. Such at least is
the anthropological position; which does not mean that we dis-
agree with the historians when they say that among the Greeks,
and among a number of other peoples, restraints upon liberty
are known to have decreased parallel with an increase in popu-
lation and a growing complexity of social organization. In that
connection we return to matters upon which we have touched
before.

The agreement between the disciplines of anthropology and
history upon liberty among the Greeks (seemingly in every re-
spect except upon whether the Greeks invented it) leads us to
ask whether we are perhaps guilty of a purely verbal dispute.
Is there no issue here but the definition of a term? Have the
historians so redefined liberty (even while saying with Profes-
sor Hyde that they are using it “in our sense of the word”) that

VILH JALMUR STEFANSSON 407

they can consistently speak of as having liberty people like the
Greeks, for whom even the historians claim only a limited
amount of freedom, and then speak of as not having liberty
people like the Eskimos who, in comparison with the Greeks,
had a larger number of freedoms and had many if not most of
them in a higher degree?

Evidently the historians must have redefined liberty, at least
in the back of their minds ; for they do speak of liberty having
been invented by the Greeks.

Seemingly, then, the historian does not think it an exercise
of liberty when an Eskimo group makes a decision through
informal conversations during a few months and an informal
arrival at a majority opinion which governs their conduct for
some time thereafter 5 but he does think it an exercise of liberty
when Republicans and Democrats campaign the United States
for several months, cast a ballot on the first Tuesday after the
first Monday in November, and thereby arrive at a decision
which governs the United States for some time.

Or do the historians perhaps think we have liberty because
we have both democratic institutions and great power as a na-
tion, but that the Eskimos have not liberty (although their in-
stitutions are freer than any democracy) because they are not
powerful enough to withstand, say, the Government of the
Northwest Territories of Canada or that of the Territory of
Alaska? If so, the historians speak merely as of today. For if
they will consider the evidence they will find that the Eskimos
of northernmost North America were more powerful than the
Indians just south of them when white men first arrived in
those districts, and that there is indication they had been more
powerful than any other people of whom they had even hearsay
knowledge for more centuries than the United States has yet
been a free nation. We in America are more affected today by
the actions of a country like Argentina or Hungary than the
Eskimos of northern Canada were through at least a number
of centuries by the conduct of the Athapascan Indians — the only
people with whom there was any known chance they could come
in contact.

We mentioned, when saying that the Eskimos of northern

FREEDOM

408

Canada had most of those things which Professor Hyde sped-
fies as being the results of Greek liberty, that the chief, if not
the only, exception would be taboo. The Greeks may not have
been quite so free from taboo as the Professor intimates, or at
least one sees the chance for a debate with him on it; but cer-
tainly they were freer than the Eskimos. The Greeks were not,
however, freer than the Eskimos from sex taboos. There are a
number of classes of taboos which we have today that neither
the Greeks nor the Eskimos had ; there is also a large and rigid
class of taboos which the Eskimos do have that were less devel-
oped or absent among the Greeks.

That Eskimo taboos are a serious restriction upon freedom
is not quite as true for them as it has been for the Jews at cer-
tain stages of their culture.

Eskimo food taboos, their largest single group, are not of
the kind the Jews had. There is, for instance, no Eskimo con-
cept which is nearly related to the Jewish idea that you must
not use the flesh of an animal unless it splits the hoof and chews
the cud, nor do the Eskimos have anything resembling kosher
meat. But while the Eskimo food taboo does not resemble a
Deuteronomy taboo, it does resemble the prohibitions that are
imposed upon us by physicians. A doctor tells me to go easy on
meat ; he prescribes for you the avoidance of cocktails; to Jones
he forbids a group of foods which he claims are fattening; to
Brown he forbids certain breakfast cereals because (he says) they
might aggravate a digestive trouble. “Doctor’s orders,” when of
that kind, resemble superficially at least the food taboos of the
Eskimos.

Our historians do not seem to feel it a notable abridgment
of the liberties of the American people that tens of thousands
of us are following taboos for which we have paid a doctor or
which we have taken from the pages of a magazine.

The case for the closer resemblance of Eskimo food taboos
to modern ones than to those of biblical Jews is strongest when
we make it for sections of the Eskimo territory like Coronation
Gulf that are most removed from known outside influences.
The Coronation group had, so far as I discovered, only one
taboo that resembled the Jewish — none of them ever ate bear

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 409

livers. The rest of their taboos were individual. An old lady
had said about her newborn grandson that until he killed his
first caribou he must not eat marrow from the left front leg of
any caribou. A father had said to his young son that until he
was able to build his first good snowhouse he was never to break
a marrow bone by hitting it against a stone, but must always lay
it down first and hit it with the stone. A shaman had been to
the moon and had learned up there that caribou would soon
appear if everyone in the community (or perhaps all the women
in the community, or all the childless women in the community,
or the left-handed men in the community, or something of that
sort) would refrain from eating grouse livers. As the result of
a trance a shaman had informed an expectant mother that she
would have easy delivery if she walked around the house from
right to left, and not from left to right, the first time she went
outdoors each morning, and if at the same time she chewed on
a piece of sinew, without swallowing it.

Such were the typical Coronation taboos — surely not much
greater infringements on liberty than our seeing the moon over
the right (or is it the left?) shoulder, not walking under a
ladder, or being careful to knock on wood.

The Eskimos of the Colville section in Alaska did have a
number of taboos that resembled the old Jewish ones. No child
of a given sex might eat certain parts of an animal until attain-
ing a certain age or achieving a certain goal. Specific parts of
certain animals might not be eaten by a woman before mar-
riage 3 there were other parts that she might not eat even after
marriage until her first child was born; and there were food
taboos where a woman did not attain complete freedom until
after her fifth child. Even so, there might be abridgments of
the same freedom if one of her children were ill, a different
abridgment if two of them were ill, and still another if her
brother’s child was ill.

These mountain Eskimos of Alaska, and some others, had
indeed developed (or borrowed) a taboo system that outsmarted
Deuteronomy. But would the historians think of Jews as unfree
though they had the taboos of Deuteronomy if they had also

410 FREEDOM

the freedoms of the Greeks? The Colville Eskimos had more
freedom than the Greeks.

The anthropological part of our discussion has been upon the
assumption that liberty “in our sense of the word” is that lib-
erty of which we are thinking when we say that Hitler, Stalin,
or Roosevelt are wanting to deprive us of it. We have not tried,
except for mentioning the possibility of a verbal dispute, to
discuss a liberty such that a Greek is free if he has it and an
Eskimo is not free though he has it.

CONCLUSIONS

We state some conclusions regarding liberty, not from their
having been established by this inadequate discussion but rather
from the general nature of the body of anthropological facts
and resulting doctrine.

If we know that man is descended from apes, or from an
apelike animal, then we surely know that he cannot have in-
vented liberty during the time he was becoming or since he
became man 5 for you do not invent the thing you have. We
believe that what man did invent was the infringement of
liberty. More, we think we know he must have done so; for
we seem agreed both that earlier he did not have it and that
later he had it.

We think, from a comparative study of the scale running
from what we call primitive to what we call high, that there
is most freedom in the lowest cultures, though with exceptions 5
and that there is usually least in the middle group. In the high-
est cultures you are watching a group of prestidigitators j for
now you see liberty and now you don’t.

If the Greeks are known to have rediscovered liberty,
whether once or twice, it does not seem improbable that the
Mexicans of 1500, if not molested by the Spaniards, might have
rediscovered a liberty which their forefathers began to lose
when they were at some such stage of culture as that of the
Coronation Eskimos of 1910. For the probability seems to be

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 41 I

that the ideas and devices both of liberty and of servitude have
been rediscovered in various cultures in many lands.

Even with their slavery, and many repressive institutions, the
Greeks did have considerable liberty during what we call their
Great Age. A high civilization is, then, not necessarily low in
liberty.

It may be, as Professor Hyde implies, that the Greeks had
more abridgments of liberty in earlier times, before the Trojan
war, than they had when they defeated the Persians. If so, they
were on a rising curve of a liberty cycle at least from Homer
to Alexander. Thereafter, again as Professor Hyde says, they
were on a downward swing of the curve. Perhaps there has
been a recent slight upward swing, say from the time when
Byron went south to help them re-establish their ancient liberty
(or was it their ancient glory?).

Since the average high cultures are not quite so bad, from the
abridgment of liberty angle, as the majority just below them,
those partial to liberty may perhaps reasonably take heart. For
it is at least not incompatible with the trend of the evidence
to hope that the cultures now most advanced may advance still
further, and so to where it can be rightly said that there is as
much freedom in the highest as in the lowest human societies.

Ralph W. Gerard

Professor of Physiology , University of Chicago

ORGANIC FREEDOM

O RGANIC freedom broadly is concerned with the be-
I havior or action of organisms; and only as these essen-
tial concepts are given substance will a consideration
of organic freedom be significant. “Organism” has two distinct
meanings. It denotes, on the one hand, a living indivdiual,
plant or animal, single or many celled; and, on the other, that
sort of unit system of which animate beings are the outstanding
example. Any system sufficiently distinguishable from its sur-
roundings to be identified as a unit and composed itself of lesser
units which are interrelated in the whole is an organism in the
wide sense — a molecule, a galaxy, a house, a university.

I have tried to minimize confusion by introducing the term
“org” for the inclusive category and reserving “organism” for
its most common usage. Orgs, then, include animorgs and
inanimorgs, and the former rubric includes organisms. A cell
in a multicellular organism is likewise an animorg; and a society
or ecological community of organisms is as clearly one. The
term “epiorganism” has proved useful for the latter. A single
cell, then, while itself an animorg may be a unit in an animorg
of higher order, a multicellular organism; and a single organ-
ism may be a unit of an epiorganism, an animorg of still higher
order.

We shall especially be concerned in this essay in examining
freedom of units in animorgs and of animorgs in their environ-
ment; yet, although this class of orgs possesses characteristics

RALPH W. GERARD

413

unique to itself and superimposed upon those common to all
orgs, few if any of our conclusions will prove less valid for
inanimorgs than for animorgs.

“Freedom” has to do with the restriction or lack of restriction
of action. It is a common word, with many and powerful con-
notations which have been built mainly upon our own subjective
and, often, emotional experience. When circumstances permit
me to behave as I “wish,” when “no” restrictions are imposed,
then I am “completely free.” The alternate situation frustrates
my volition; I much prefer the freedom to do exactly as I
please — an omnipotent animalcule in, yet independent of, the
universe.

Stated so, it is obvious enough that freedom derives from a
private egotism, a primitive drive to power and resistance to
thwarting, and nearly always is used to express a state of license
or capriciousness. The free actor suffers no restraint and may
be as aimless or purposeful, as erratic or consistent, as bad or
good, in his actions as he pleases. Yet freedom does not stem
from chaos, as this would demand, but from order. Such mat-
ters as determinism, free will, contingency, and time, as well as
purpose, are bound up with freedom; and we must examine
orgs more closely with such problems in mind.

I have elsewhere ( Scientific Monthly , 1940) developed in
some detail the parallelism between a community of cells and
one of organisms, and have shown the very real justification for
regarding an epiorganism society and an organism as like cases.
Each is an individual animorg built of units with certain rela-
tions among themselves and to the whole; and these relations —
the mechanisms of integration included — are alike in both. I
shall, therefore, not hesitate to pass from one order of animorg
to another in pursuing the present essay. Indeed, the great part
of the following discussion of freedom and determination ap-
plies to all orgs, animate or not.

Consider the behavior of a cell in a multicellular organism —
a nerve cell in your brain, a protective cell in your skin, or a
white cell in your blood. You, the organism, have no subjective
awareness of any equivalent awareness on the part of your
units; nor is there any evidence that such awareness as they

FREEDOM

414

possess includes a recognition of being part of a greater col-
lective unitary awareness. Nor can you do more than infer the
subjective elements in other organisms like yourself. We shall
do well, then, to eliminate for the moment any argument from
volition and consciousness and depend on the objective evidence
from action or behavior.

A single unit can act, deterministically, only in response to an
internal influence or stimulus or to an external one or to a com-
bination of them. For a unit in an org, however, it is useful to
further divide — though the demarcation is not sharp — those ex-
ternal influences which originate in the org from those which
originate beyond it. A particular muscle cell might contract in
response to some change within itself, to some change in the
blood bathing it or the nerve connected to it, or to some change
in the environment of the whole organism — say a strong elec-
tromagnetic field.

Of course, org changes themselves are commonly initiated
from the environment, but sometimes a long regression inter-
venes. The nerve impulse which makes the muscle contract may
depend upon an immediately preceding prick to the skin, the
simple reflex; but it may depend upon the position of the bal-
ancing organ in the ear, and so on the attitude of the head, and
so on many other muscular contractions, before being referred
to the external force of gravity and the external stimulus which
led to a bending of the head. Still more, the nerve impulse may
seem to arise spontaneously in the brain in the course of “will-
ing.” In this last instance we would have a unit, the nerve cell,
responding to its own internal state; which is the same case,
named above, of the muscle cell initiating its own contraction.

If org control of its units can commonly be traced back to
environmental action on the org, perhaps intrinsic control of the
unit similarly traces back to action on the unit by its org. The
answer to this must define the degree of indeterminacy of the
unit. To the extent that the unit originates its action fully within
itself its behavior is indeterminate. But “fully” covers a great
deal, for the past as well as the present is involved. A particular
atom of radium may disintegrate in a second or a million years
from any moment in time; and no known external agent has any

RALPH W. GERARD

415

influence on this behavior. Yet a population of such atoms ex-
hibits a regular and predictable rate of decay, just as a popula-
tion of human beings exhibits a set death rate. In the case of the
atom, we may refer events to the probability of a certain energy
configuration occurring between its nuclear units and so exclude
the past history of the atom or the control from outside it; and,
of course, a certain indeterminacy at the subatomic levels seems
to be established by modern physical theory. The time of death
of a particular man, however, is clearly not independent of
his individual past or of his environment, whatever balance of
indeterminateness may enter at any moment. Perhaps the same
is true, on a different scale, for the atom.

Many have argued from indeterminacy of the electron,
through trigger action, to freedom, or free will, of the organ-
ism. One universal characteristic of animorgs is adaptive ampli-
fication, the ability to respond to a small amount of energy
applied as a stimulus by releasing a much greater amount of
energy and by directing this energy to maintenance of its own
equilibrium state. A feeble stimulus to a sense organ initiates
nerve impulses which spread in the nervous system, reach motor
nerves, and elicit powerful muscle contractions which tend to
eliminate the stimulus. Such a typical reflex — the pulling away
of the finger from a flame, or the emptying of the filled urinary
bladder — is the familiar case of trigger action or adaptive ampli-
fication.

But not all behavior can be traced so directly to an environ-
mental or even to an intraorg stimulus; “voluntary” acts con-
stitute the clearest apparent exception. The next word I write —
tatterdemalion — seems to be subject to my choice. No question
arises here about the needed muscle movements, they are fully
controlled by nerve impulses reaching them; nor is there any
uncertainty about these nerve impulses, which travel in a
mechanical manner along the nerve fibers into which they are
discharged from certain nerve cells. The problem centers about
these nerve cells in the top of the brain: are they set in action,
in this particular pattern, by stimuli reaching them from other
parts of the organism — other sensory nerve impulses, for ex-
ample, or some alteration in the chemical state of the blood

FREEDOM

4l6

which flows past them 5 or are these cerebral neurones able to
initiate appropriate discharges intrinsically? If the latter, then
the analysis must be pressed further to the electron or ion, for
nerve discharges originate from electric currents in the cell.
The cell membrane may be in a state of unstable equilibrium
so that the indeterminate movement of an electron suffices to
unbalance it, a nerve impulse is discharged, other cells are fired
off by it, muscles contract, and the electron has pulled the
trigger and exploded an act of the organism.

Now it is true that nerve cells can continue to beat electrically
in a constant environment within the body or even outside of
it. And it is further true that this beat can be modified by all
sorts of external circumstances — as temperature and chemicals —
which alter its internal metabolism or electrical charge. But it
must be obvious that a strictly indeterminate electron jump
within a nerve cell could not lead to regular co-ordinated be-
havior by the organism, despite any amount of trigger action.
The amplification can exist but it would not be adaptive. The
man’s acts would not be controlled by his free will but by some
electron’s caprice. No organic freedom can be derived from an
indeterminism of the org’s units or of its subunits 3 this leads
only to a helpless impotency at the hands of the unpredictable,
to chaos, not to freedom.

The discharges of brain nerve cells, then, which led to my
writing the word I “willed” to write must have been somehow
determined by other events in my organism. To be sure, such
mechanisms as already mentioned — other nerve impulses or
chemicals — may act upon these nerve cells 3 but the question
still persists: How were these set in motion? If immediately
from outside of the organism, we are back to the obvious reflex
type of behavior. If immediately from within it, then the
regression is extended — through internal sense organs, which
are stimulated by blood pressure, which is increased by hor-
mones, which are released by other nerves, which are activated
from the brain stem and cerebrum by a sound, which had be-
come a meaningful word as a result of the conditioning of past
experiences, or what you will — until sometime in the past the
chain again is traced to an origin from the environment of the

RALPH W. GERARD

4 17

org. On such analysis, volition is completely reduced again to
controlled action 3 and spontaneous or free behavior becomes
merely that which is under controls so intricate and distant that
they are not readily traced.

There can be no question that the overwhelming bulk of our
“free” actions are determined. What response is made to a
given situation can be predicted with ever higher accuracy as
the individual is better known: all normal humans throw out
their arms when they stumble; nearly all will exclaim when
suddenly hurt, and in a particular language; the American, but
not the Englishman, answers the telephone with “Hello”; and
Mr. Micawber could be depended on to meet adversity with
the ineffectual optimism of “Something will turn up.” A person
given the appropriate suggestion while under hypnosis will per-
form some bizarre act hours or days later, yet think he did it of
his “free will” and supply some rational reason. The psycho-
analyst can often predict days or weeks in advance what emo-
tions, dreams, and acts a patient will experience or perform.
And in compulsive neurotic or psychotic states, even the sub-
jective experience of freedom is gone — the sufferer “must” per-
form a certain act despite his maximum power of willing not to.

Is the determination complete, however, or is there a small
residue of contingency at each org level; not an indeterminacy
of the unit amplified in the org, but the converse — an org con-
trol of the unit? Can some sui-generic act of willing, arising
de novo in me, set off my nerve cells without the mediation of
the familiar physiological mechanisms? Can the organism di-
rectly control its electrons?

An oblique approach to this question may be profitable, even
if it remain unanswered. There are but few possible relations
between an org and its units. The org might control its units
completely, or partially, or not at all; and similarly for control
by the units of the org. Certain possibilities can at once be ex-
cluded. A complete control of units by org and of org by units
would present an entirely self-contained system subject to ab-
solutely no influence from outside itself. Only the whole uni-
verse is such a system, and that by definition. Complete lack of
control in both directions between org and units is likewise ex-

FREEDOM

418

eluded by the very essence of an org. Interrelations between
units and whole must exist, else the assemblage is a chaotic
swarm, not a cohesive entity.

If either the units or the org completely controlled the other,
but the reverse control were not complete, then no environ-
mental influence on the system could be exerted except at and
through the controlling level. It would make no difference, in
this respect, whether the reverse control were partial or absent.
But if the control in one direction, say from org to unit, were
partial and the reverse one were absent, then the environment
could influence the unit directly or via the org but could influ-
ence the org only directly ; whereas if both were partial, envi-
ronment could act symmetrically in either direction. Complete
or absent control in either direction would lead to contradictions
with the nature of orgs; but a simple consideration of organisms
will make the point more directly.

It is patent that reciprocal control exists between the cells and
the multicellular organism they constitute, and that the environ-
ment can affect org or units through either level. A rise of en-
vironmental temperature acts upon the whole organism and sets
in motion known mechanisms which decrease the activity of
many cells and organs. The direct action of heat on these cells
would augment their activity. Conversely, the play of light and
shadow upon certain cells, receptors in the retina, may suddenly
stop or abruptly initiate generalized activity of the organism —
an animal “freezes” or flees on sighting a dangerous predator.

The school of behaviorists has emphasized the determinate
reflex aspect of organism responses, acting through units; the
gestaltists have stressed the total “set” of the whole organism
and of its environment as important modifiers of responses to
seemingly identical stimuli. Similar unitary and organismic
views have battled in other branches of biology; and, indeed,
philosophers fall into the same schools of “nothing but” and
“something more.” The whole is nothing but, or is something
more than, the sum of its parts.

I do not presume to have the answer. Surely at present no
mechanism is remotely discernible which would enable the org
directly to influence its units, other than through the known

RALPH W. GERARD

4*9

chains of successive chemical, physical, and neural events which
all trace back ultimately to an environmental stimulus. But these
units collectively respond so appropriately, even at the highest
levels of integration, and with so little regard to their existence
as units, and the subjective experiences of organic unity and of
spontaneity are seemingly so universal, that it is wise to avoid
an extreme conclusion.

Fortunately, as earlier indicated, this point is not crucial for
the present argument ; for, whether or not a residuum of free
will remains for the organism, the overwhelming majority —
for immediate practical purposes all — of its acts are determined.
Org and units interact with each other, and the environment
acts upon both via either. What is important and demonstrable
is that the relative intensities of the org-unit reciprocal controls
are not uniform in all cases but show certain consistent trends
in the animorg spectrum.

When animorgs are placed in an “ascending” scale of evolu-
tion the control of units by org increases relative to that of org
by units. “Higher” organisms appeared, on the whole, later in
earth history than did “lower” ones; they manifest a greater
sensitivity to a wider range of environmental influences; they
perform more intricate acts at higher speed and with improved
co-ordination; they are more integrated orgs with new kinds of
increasingly specialized units functioning in greater interrela-
tion. And, at each animorg level — cellular, organismic, and
societal alike — evolutionary change makes the unit less an inde-
pendent individual and more a subservient bit of the greater

org. #

Primitive cells, which are also unicellular organisms, have
protoplasmic bodies with negligible regional differentiation. All
portions are actually or potentially interchangeable, and any
small fragment can regenerate the whole. Advanced cells show
great differentiation into fixed body parts, and certain of these,
for example, the nucleus, are essential to continued life, yet
are irreplaceable.

In multicellular organisms, the rich assortment of forms
illustrates every shade of transition from a loose colony of cells
to a unified individual. The boundary between a colony, of

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420

unicellular attached protozoa, and a multicellular individual,
a sponge composed of cells resembling these protozoa, is un-
certain almost to the point of arbitrary definition. A sponge can
be fragmented into single cells, yet these are able to migrate
to reconstitute the individual. Further along, a small bit of any
body region of a hydra or a fiatworm can remold itself and
grow into a complete individual. Cuttings of many plants can
develop similarly. Insects and crayfish, more advanced, can re-
pair the loss of an appendage but the lost leg is doomed.
Finally, in vertebrates, any extensive mutilation of the body is
fatal and regeneration is limited to bits of skin, bone, and blood
which have been injured. In fact, the shift from homogeneity
and independence to an interdependent heterogeneity can be
followed in the development of an egg. Before fertilization,
five per cent of the egg (which is a simple org) may regenerate
the whole 5 when development, differentiation, and integration
have changed it into an adult vertebrate, the whole may not be
able to regenerate a missing five per cent.

Epiorganisms exhibit entirely comparable variations. A colony
of sponges is simply some individuals in propinquity. One of
corals shows more interdependence and, for example, possesses
a characteristic form. A beehive, an anthill, a termite nest is
each a well-knit epiorganism with specialized mutually de-
pendent units and a characteristic form and function. The shape
of the group nest is as distinctive for a termite species as is the
shape of the single body 5 the epiorganism disintegrates when a
vital unit, the queen, is lost. Loose and ephemeral epiorganisms
are seen in flocks of birds or hunting wolf packs; more devel-
oped ones, in herds of grazers; still more advanced examples
in Indian tribes, in single families or clans; perhaps most strik-
ingly, in a whaler and its crew — remaining for years as an
isolated, highly integrated org.

As an org advances in integration, its units lose in independ-
ence. A drop of mercury confined in the capillary of a ther-
mometer is less “free” than one on an open surface. A cell,
specialized for motion in a metazoan body, has renounced its
heritage of immortality, of reproduction, even of nourishing
itself. Its action or inactivity is normally under the complete

RALPH W. GERARD

4 2 I

control of the organism via nerve fibers which run to it. It can
perform only one of the many duties which living things must
execute — for the others it depends on fellow-members of the
cell community — but for this one it is especially differentiated
and its performance is superb. The unit narrows but intensifies
its competence $ the separate functions are parceled out in the
org to many unit specialists 3 and these units are co-ordinated
into a harmonious whole by org mechanisms which, like the
units, are ever more diversified, specific, numerous, and, most
important, powerful: this is the path to greater org integration.

Animorgs at the epiorganism level are no different. As a
society evolves, say the United States nation, its units also
become differentiated for special functions and act under in-
tensified org controls which reintegrate the lot. The parallel
with a metazoan body is surprisingly close — units perform the
same set of functions, and the same org mechanisms regulate
their performance. Mechanical forces, transported substances,
transmitted stimuli, and spatial intensity gradients which are
timeless, alike in the body and the society, control the activity
and even the differentiation of the units. And the control tends
ever towards greater completeness 5 towards some sort of totali-
tarianism if you will.

It is hardly necessary to dwell on the familiar epiorganism
case. As a community changes from a frontier outpost to an
urban center, the men and women who compose it become co-
operating specialists. The man who could farm, butcher, build,
trade, fight, hunt, doctor, judge — all in primitive fashion — is
succeeded by one who is a far more expert architect, banker,
soldier, physician, or lawyer but who is unable to function in the
other roles. The integrating mechanisms of transportation and
communication increase in distance, speed, and power of con-
trol 5 from mule pack to air express and from smoke signal to
radio broadcast, these forces of unification and regulation have
steadily grown in effectiveness, and the person has been sub-
merged in the group. A baby, like an egg, is a relatively undif-
ferentiated unit which becomes specialized and limited under
the org forces which preside over its maturation. The man’s
language, dress, interests, habits, skills, depend (as to kind)

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422

overwhelmingly on the nation, community, class, family in
which he grew.

You and I, today, require the skilled efforts of others, many
on another hemisphere, to feed, clothe, warm, convey, protect,
amuse us; an epidemic in Japan, a political upheaval in Argen-
tina, a financial collapse in Europe, a blizzard in the prairie
States, can dislocate the life of a New Yorker even to the extent
of physical suffering. The art, science, literature, technology,
politics, and ideas of all the world are ours in a day and pro-
foundly influence our thoughts and actions. Does not Holly-
wood set the mode for much of the world? All mankind is a
loose epiorganism and is rapidly, amazingly rapidly, moving
towards integration.

Physically and intellectually, the unit is immersed in an in-
creasingly complex and regulated environment supplied by the
epiorganism, and is increasingly dependent on this org milieu
for its development and healthy survival. In the same way, the
blood and fluids of the vertebrate body constitute an internal
environment for the tissue cells 5 and elaborate organismic de-
vices preserve the constancy of salts, foods, oxygen, acidity,
temperature, pressure, and many other attributes of these “nurs-
ing” liquids. An isolated protozoan survives the wide chemical
and physical vicissitudes of pond water; a mammalian brain or
heart or kidney cell is killed or disabled by far smaller fluctua-
tions in the state of the blood. The highly “civilized” man can
survive and function only within a tremendously circumscribed
range of corporeal and intellectual conditions, created and kept
constant by the epiorganism in which he is embedded.

What, then, of the freedom of an individual man, as a unit in
the social org and in the whole universe? This is the case of
most intense interest to us. Complete freedom is an illusion of
the emotions. Man is not free to leave this planet, to stop eating
or breathing, to stay continuously awake for a week or to run
two hundred yards at the rate for one hundred. These physical
and physiological strictures we are rarely aware of and do not
rebel against, they are part of “the way things are.”

But the org restrictions of freedom — the “thou shalts” and
“thou shalt nots” of religious faith, of social code, of judicial

RALPH W. GERARD

4 2 3

law, of group and neighborhood standard, of family tradition,
of individual conscience — these epiorganism controls seem more
arbitrary and less inevitable. Yet, aside from detail, they are
natural and necessary elements in the evolving integration of
the epiorganism from a chaos of independent units, complete
“anarchy,” towards a unified nation or internation, complete
“totalitarianism.”

The renunciation of the individual privilege to kill, to plun-
der, to run where one will, even to be as noisy as one’s mood
may urge, is the price with which is purchased other more cher-
ished privileges. Comfortable homes and tasty meals, theater
and music and books, the very possession of language and ab-
stract symbolic thinking are the proceeds of such barter. Would
any prefer the freedom of wandering over the virgin continent,
naked, often cold and hungry, stalking or being stalked by other
animals, alone or in a family group, able to communicate only
by signs and animal sounds and concerned with communicating
only about imminent danger or opportunity?

Man is overwhelmingly a unit in his org, not a single inde-
pendent unit 3 and the society creates tremendous opportunities
for him to develop, specialize, and express himself. It offers
new avenues for “free” action — man was not free to speak with-
out language or to read without writing or to reason without
symbols. For freedom is almost the reverse of unrestraint. A
free object is one subjected to a single or a harmonious group
of influences rather than to seriously opposing ones. It acts
without conflict and in the particular direction in which it is
impelled. A free-falling body, a free-wheeling automobile, a
free-floating balloon, are precisely such cases and are accurately
called “free.”

Further, even in the case of epiorganism checks and impul-
sions on man, himself, there is relatively little subjective aware-
ness of restraint. We feel, overwhelmingly, that we act under
internal compulsion, not external, and “run free” before our
“consciences,” which the society has developed in us. Inborn
in human nature are certain emotional drives or responses (the
pseudo-affective animal, controlled by its lower brain center,
the hypothalamus, of the physiologist 3 or the id of the psycho-

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analyst) and certain potentialities for learning or conditioning
(in the cerebral cortex). What is learned; how the inevitable
conflicts between primitive individual emotions and socialized
rational thought, between id and ego or superego, are resolved
or inflamed; which patterns of behavior become the habitual
and automatic ones; such major decisions rest with the org in
which the unit develops. Once made, in harmony with the social
pressures, the individual “freely” does what “his” desire or
determination designates. As with a cow, accustomed to being
milked from the left side, alternate possibilities are unconceived
or rejected.

It is mainly when progressive org changes produce conflict-
ing situations within the epiorganism, or when these changes
are so rapid that differentiated units and epiorgans (great in-
stitutions) can no longer follow with the needed new adjust-
ments, that questions of individual freedom arise. New geo-
graphical discoveries and racial migrations were the most im-
portant sources of change and strain in the past; new techno-
logical inventions and political forms seem to be the present
storm centers.

“Free” speech is the most treasured human freedom; and
rightly so, since the new fact or fancy is for the evolution of
the epiorganism what the new gene mutation or recombination
is for that of the organism. This freedom is in danger only as
it threatens the older order with the newer; when epiorganism
strains begin to mold new human units to have different
thoughts. Society troubled no one who said that the earth is
round, or that man arose from simian ancestors, until he began
to offer disturbing evidence that he might be correct. Similarly,
it became dangerous to question the divine right of kings or the
blessings of laissez faire only when they had already come
under question.

The issue I am raising is this: as org influences become more
pervading and powerful (as they must and do; consider the
huge growth of physical power by exploiting natural resources
of coal and oil and water and by building machines of destruc-
tion), what of the danger that power may be concentrated in
a few units which selfishly oppose normal change? In the organ-

RALPH W. GERARD

425

ism, dominance of certain cells and organs, for example the
brain cortex, is essential to integration of the org and is healthy ;
but pathological breakdown or exaggeration or “usurpation” of
these gradients of control and of activity does occur. In the
epiorganism, likewise, gradients of control are normal enough —
universities, armies, businesses, governments are so organized —
but they may become distorted and pathological and, if not
corrected, be fatal to the afflicted epiorganism. Which, if any,
of the conflicting types of epiorganisms will have adequate sur-
vival value, on strictly biological criteria, I dare not predict.
Some relative considerations as to existing democratic and to-
talitarian states have been presented in the essay earlier men-
tioned.

Two more problems must be hurriedly touched, those of
purpose and of value. Purpose seems to be present in action
whenever the antecedent event is more easily interpreted in
terms of the consequent one than the reverse. When we see
bone cells maneuvered into proper positions to support the or-
ganism’s weight, or blood vessels dilate to supply more oxygen
to active tissues, or white blood cells force their way into an
infected region to destroy bacteria, it is hard to avoid the con-
notation of purpose. Yet any purpose is not in the immediate
act, which is determined by well-established mechanisms, but
rather in the selection or creation of these particular mecha-
nisms.

A drop of water winding its way steadfastly to the sea show r s
no less purpose than an amoeba “seeking” food; nor is the
mechanism, gravity, which directs the water better understood
than those which direct the body cells, perhaps even less so.
Similarly, men are used by their epiorganism to serve its “pur-
pose” of survival and evolution. They are directed into one
or another function by org forces to which the individual is
subject even when he is cognizant of them; indeed we probably
know more of these than of the ones, simpler but more remote
from our immediate experience, which direct the cells of an
organism.

Whether, or how, by the combined “purposes” of its unit
men can direct or expedite the evolution of a society is a ques-

FREEDOM

426

tion obscured in the uncertainties of two others : the existence or
degree of indeterminism of the org, already touched upon; and
the manner in which an org consciousness or will is built from
that of its units. I know no answer to this latter — I have no
insight whatever into how my unitary organismic awareness
arises from the multiple awarenesses of my constituent cells,
whatever these may be; nor can I extrapolate from my sub-
jective experience as a unit in an epiorganism to the nature of
the epiorganismic awareness.

But, whatever freedom there be for purposeful striving
towards certain ends, these ends can be partially evaluated from
the evolutionary viewpoint. The ethic or value most insistently
seen in natural selection is that of ruthless competition, of
might makes right. This is a very small part of the truth. The
main biological virtue, seen at the cell, organism, and epior-
ganism levels alike, is co-operation among units and self-
sacrifice of the unit for the org. This is a virtue in the objective
sense that it has a high survival value, that animorgs possessing
it in greater degree succeed in exploiting more of the environ-
mental resources than do others possessing less. Indeed, a cer-
tain amount of “co-operation” is implicit in the very character
of orgs.

All sorts of body mechanisms lead to the sacrifice of the unit
for the whole — we need look no further than the plant cells
which form woody tubes and then disintegrate to leave open
sap channels, or the animal blood cells which advance, often
to sure death, towards invading bacteria. It is simple to say at
this level that the unit is exhibiting no altruism in its sacrifice,
for the whole process is mechanistically determined. But the
same is true for men, as cells of the epiorganism; and the same
degree of freedom, none or slight, exists at both levels.

Man acts overwhelmingly from internal compulsion, but this
we have seen is determined by the society in which he matured.
And the more integrated the epiorganism, the more clearly is
the balance in favor of unselfish co-operative behavior. The dic-
tates of one’s conscience are far more tyrannical than those of
one’s fellows. The sacrifices of friend for friend, of mother for
child, of member for clan, of citizen for country and, perhaps

RALPH W. GERARD

427

most of all, those of believer for abstract belief, are incom-
parably greater than those deliberately made for selfish ends
and may transcend death in the suffering accepted. Animals also
renounce individual welfare for that of others in the family or
pack 5 but only when incorporated into a human epiorganism
do they give evidence of an abstract loyalty. If even a few of
the stories of dogs starving on a master’s grave or dashing into
a flaming building after a baby are true, they are striking testi-
mony of the power and pervasiveness of org influences making
for co-operation.

And so we reach the position that organic freedom is a very
different thing from what it is often taken to be. Man in his
society has at most a trace of internal indeterminacy. As the
society evolves, he is subject to ever more immediate control
by it, less to control by his extraorg environment. But these
controls mostly leave him “free,” for they mold him so that he
“wills” to do the things he must. And as certain liberties are
lost, others more precious (by our standards) are created. Epi-
organisms, as organisms, evolve towards greater control of their
units, towards totalitarianism, but some forms seem biologically
less sound than others, and many of the existing societies will
surely not survive. 1 As history unfolds I am confident that man
will find himself more subject but less slave.

1 It should be obvious that this paper is not directly concerned with any
particular totalitarian or other existing State. Yet, with world events shaking
our lives and emotions, it may be wise to state explicitly that each of the
existing dictatorships embodies several attributes which are spurious and un-
fortunate additions to its totalitarian form. Thus, the terrorism, falsifications,
irrationalism, and martial orientation of Nazi dominated Germany are not
essential elements in its basically advanced integration as a nation. In their
absence Germany might have helped to lead the world forward rather than
to threaten its achievements of centuries.

William Lyon Phelps

Professor Emeritus of English Literature , Yale University

FREEDOM AND LITERATURE

I F I were to write an article on the well-worn theme,
“books which have influenced me, 75 I should name among
them Essay on Liberty by John Stuart Mill. This was
published in 1859 anc ^ was never more needed than in 1940.
I read it when I was seventeen, and it immediately became part
of my. mental furniture. It is no exaggeration to say that I use
it every day. MilPs love of liberty was equaled by his courage,
the rarest of all qualities in what are called public men. For
when a committee called upon him, asking him to stand for
Parliament (it is significant that the American runs for Congress
and the Englishman stands for Parliament) he agreed, but only
on certain conditions. He said that although he had enough
money, he would not contribute a penny ; the office should be
open to all, irrespective of worldly possessions ; that if he were
elected he would endeavor worthily to represent his constitu-
ents; but that if any measure came up which he thought best
for the country as a whole, he would support it, even if it were
against the interests and expressed wishes of his constituents.
One of the committee exclaimed, “God Almighty could not be
elected on that platform!” Possibly not; but Mill was. During
the campaign, he addressed an assembly of workingmen and
as he rose to speak, an enormous transparency was elevated
which bore the sentence “Workingmen are usually liars” and in
response to the public question, “Did you say that, Mr. Mill?”
he replied, “Yes,” and the audience broke out in tremendous

WILLIAM LYON PHELPS 429

In a discussion of freedom and literature, one should not
only set a high value on freedom but a high value on literature.
I regard literature as more important than politics, economics,
and science. For while man cannot live without bread, he can-
not live on bread alone. And although historians give an im-
mense amount of space and emphasis to wars, wars are not
nearly so important as literature. The best of all recorded wars
was the Trojan war, because it produced more excellent litera-
ture than all the rest of the wars of the world put together.
The fact that it was fought for a woman and that every soldier
on both sides knew what he was fighting for gave it an oddity
all its own; but its chief distinction was in its literary legacies.

One might say that war is not history but rather an interrup-
tion of history; after any particular war is finished, the nations
involved must try to clean up after its appalling waste, and
resume their daily and normal activities. Literature is the im-
mortal part of history:

“Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold.”

Carlyle said no nation is great unless it has a voice. The true
greatness of nations consists in their contributions to civiliza-
tion; and the greatest contributions to civilization are found not
in material comforts or in timesaving or laborsaving devices,
but in literature, the theater, painting, sculpture, architecture,
music, and all the fine arts. Even the commercial value of these
is an interesting by-product, when we remember that Phidias
has brought and is bringing more money to Greece (to take
only one illustration) than all the merchants and businessmen
past or present. For hundreds of thousands of tourists go thither
only because of the ancient works of art.

No nation is great unless it has a voice . Italy is not great be-
cause every boy sleeps on his knapsack; Italy is great because of
Dante and Petrarch and Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo,
Andrea, and all the rest. Germany is not great because she has
extended her territory over Austria, Poland, and other areas;
Germany is great because of Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, Bach,
Beethoven, Wagner, and all the rest. Russia is great not because
of Czarism or Communism or Lenin; Russia is great because
of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Chekhov, and other writers;

FREEDOM

43 °

England is great not because she has the most powerful navy
in the world, but because she has produced more great poets
than any other nation.

No nation can ever be defeated if she has made imperishable
contributions to literature. The Romans conquered Greece in
146 b.c. and immediately the conquered country began the con-
quest of her conquerer. The Romans surrendered to the Greek
gods, the Greek literature, and the Greek language. Hitler may
or may not be defeated, but no country can defeat Goethe and
Beethoven. I was reading the other day in the London Spec-
tator an article by Nevinson, who said that when he was Eng-
lish war correspondent in the Boer War, and stood by while in
the presence of Earl Roberts the Boer flag was hauled down
and the British flag was hauled up, signal of complete and final
victory, he then walked through the town and heard in a Boer
house a woman playing Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata. “And
this is a conquered country?” he meditated. “But no force can
defeat a country where the conquered inhabitants play Bee-
thoven.” That glorious music was a paean of eternal victory,
an indestructible and everlasting triumph.

To show how far Europe has relapsed into barbarism since
the first decade of the twentieth century we have only to recall
a questionnaire sent about 1905 to many thousands of Germans
by the weekly magazine Arena } asking them to name “the
twelve most important Germans living.” Here is the result:

1. Emperor William

2. Gerhart Hauptmann

3. Dr. Robert Koch

4. Ernst Haeckel

5. Professor Roentgen

6. Prince von Billow

7. Max Klinger

8. Richard Strauss

9. August Bebel
xo. General Haeseler

1 1 . Professor Behring

12. Reinhold Begas

The immensely significant fact is that next to the German
Emperor (and the vote for him was complimentary) the private

WILLIAM LYON PHELPS

43 1

citizen regarded as the most important in the whole nation was
a man who had never done anything useful 3 who had never, in
the accepted sense of the word, done a day’s “work”; it was
the poet, novelist, dramatist, Gerhart Hauptmann. He was re-
garded as more important than Dr. Koch whose discoveries in
tuberculosis had saved thousands of children; than Professor
Behring, discoverer of the diphtheria antitoxin; than Professor
Roentgen, whose discovery of the X-ray is superlatively useful;
more important than a statesman, Prince von Billow; more
important than a great general who fought in the War of 1870;
more important than the great socialist leader, Bebel.

Furthermore, of the eleven eligible men on this list, one was
a man of letters, one was a composer of music, one was a painter
(Klinger), one was a sculptor (Begas) — and Haeckel could be
regarded as primarily belonging to literature.

The Paris edition of the New York Herald y commenting on
this list, said: “It is doubtful whether the Emperor and Prince
Billow would feel complimented in being included in the same
list as Herr August Bebel, the greatest exponent of Social De-
mocracy in Germany, and, as a matter of fact, in Europe.”

A Yale undergraduate, John H. Garber (B.A. 1923), di-
rected my attention to the following article in Life for No-
vember 3, 1921 :

ORDER OF MERIT

The refusal of the poet Hauftmann to consider the possibility of
becoming the President of the German Republic should not be
taken as a precedent. Mr. Hauptmann explains that he is very busy
writing a drama that deals with the great events of the last three
years. Political parties, and even governments, may rise and fall,
but there is always a chance that a drama by one of the world’s
most distinguished poets may become a permanent affair. . . .

It requires ability of a high second-rate order to be a statesman.

It requires ability of a high first-rate order to be a poet.

These citations are put in here to emphasize the importance
of literature and the fine arts. During the early months of de-
pression, Christopher Morley called on President Hoover in
the White House and asked him, “What at the present moment
is America’s greatest need?” And the President unhesitatingly
replied, “America’s greatest need is a great poet.”

FREEDOM

432

The fact that on the list of twelve Germans appeared both
Hauptmann and Bebel cannot be regarded as propaganda either
for poetry or for socialism 5 but it surely does indicate that those
who believe in the supreme importance of literature and the
fine arts also believe that freedom from autocracy is important
to their expression and development.

A good many recent books have dealt with the subject of
freedom. A good many philosophers have endeavored to define
the word. This is an interesting exercise of the intellectual
muscles, and is therefore valuable. But some of the analyses
and definitions of the words “liberty” and “freedom” are so
metaphysical that the ordinary reader becomes confused 5 what
seemed simple has become complex. Still, I think the common
man knows what he wants and perhaps it will help him to con-
sider concrete examples in the past and in the present. Bacon
said, “Histories make men wise.” Santayana said, “Those who
are ignorant of the past are bound to repeat it.”

The common man may not be able to give a dictionary defi-
nition of freedom 5 but if he reads an American newspaper con-
taining attacks on the President and observes that in England
in the midst of a terrible war, men are allowed to speak and
write publicly against the policy of the government, he knows
that both England and the United States are free countries.

Although in general the history of the world may show a
continual struggle for individual freedom, the cold fact is that
there has been very much less freedom since 1915 than there
was from 1815 to 1915. Before 1914 one traveled from one
country to another in Europe without the vexation of official
interference; one never exhibited a passport except in Russia.
Such freedom today seems fantastic. The ideal of human exist-
ence mentioned in the book of the prophet Micah does not seem
roseate or glorious except by the contrast of conditions in 1940:
“they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree;
and none shall make them afraid.” Here no one is promised
riches or prosperity or immunity from disease; all that is prom-
ised is individual freedom. To be let alone. It does not seem
like a Utopia. Yet how very much farther away from this sim-
plicity are we than we were in 1910!

WILLIAM LYON PHELPS

433

In another portion of the same book of Micah, the then
present conditions of life are precisely what they are today in
many places in the world:

The good man is perished out of the earth: and there is none up-
right among men: they all lie in wait for blood: they hunt every
man his brother with a net. . . .

Trust ye not in a friend, put ye not confidence in a guide: keep
the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom. . . .

... a man’s enemies are the men of his own house.

In Mr. Duffus’s review in the New York Times of a book On
Human Freedom by Jacques Barzun, the following passage
from the book is cited:

Democracy is only the special atmosphere of a constant oligarchy.
It is not better than fascism or communism in an absolute sense. It
is better only for those who prefer pluralism and the fruits of culture
to unanimity and the lazy security of regimentation. ... As a cul-
ture, and when that culture is actively kneaded by critics and crea-
tors, it affords more air to breathe freely, more room to move in,
more variety to encourage further variety.

In an article in the American magazine Esquire for February,
1940, by Dana Doten fascism and communism are called the
religion of “little men,” those who are content not only to have
the machinery of government run by rulers, but to have their
own thinking done by the same rulers. Slavery is often more
physically comfortable for the slaves than liberty ; but human
beings, with all their faults and weaknesses, prefer freedom to
security. As Mr. Bryan expressed it, “The people have a right
to make their own mistakes.” Regimentation is fatal to indi-
vidual liberty.

Even in the happy year 19 11, the English critic, George
Calderon, in the introduction to his admirable translation of
two plays by Chekhov, made the following diagnosis:

Each generation believes that it stands on the boundary line be-
tween an old bad epoch and a good new one. And still the world
grows no better; rather worse; hungrier, less various, less beautiful.
That is true; but there is consolation in the assurance that whatever

FREEDOM

434

becomes of this husk of a planet, the inner meaning of it, hope itself,
God, man’s ideal, continually progresses and develops.

That is what Mr. Calderon thought of the world in 1911$
what he thinks of it now I do not know; he was killed in the
war.

One thing is regarded as evil by both authors of the citations
just given — regimentation instead of variety . Mr. Calderon says
the world is growing worse and uglier because it is a less vari-
ous.” Mr. Barzun says that democracy is “better only for those
who prefer pluralism and the fruits of culture to unanimity and
the lazy security of regimentation.”

Enlightened minds who love culture recognize the necessity
of individual freedom. Nothing is worse for creative literature
and art than their subservience to propaganda. Even the degra-
dation of “literature” into pornography is not so evil as its de-
gradation into propaganda. For pornography is generally recog-
nized as evil and repulsive, but the use of creative writing for
nationalistic propaganda is widely regarded as moral; it is be-
lieved that the artist uses his gifts to aid a noble cause; but he
really sacrifices and degrades them. In one of Vachel Lindsay’s
most original and beautiful poems, “The Broncho Who Would
Not Be Broken,” he describes the fate of the thoroughbred
pony who was hitched by cruel men with giant mules for plow-
ing and who died rather than conform.

Although the author may not have so intended it, his poem
could be taken as a symbol of Pegasus degraded into a draft
horse for propaganda.

Some of the greatest poets have steadfastly refused. In the
Napoleonic wars, Goethe was repeatedly besought by his coun-
trymen to write poems against the French, and he invariably
refused to do this. He said, “The French are a civilized people,
and I shall not attack them.” But I think his real reason was
that he regarded poetry as more important than politics. One
day many years ago when a general election was in progress
John Morley was walking in London and, meeting the poet
Rossetti, he asked him which way he had voted. Rossetti’s reply
showed that he did not even know there was an election; and
on being informed, he remarked, “Well, I suppose one side or

WILLIAM LYON PHELPS 435

the other will get it, and it does not make much difference
which,” At the time Morley was shocked 3 but, recalling the
incident, he said, “I can’t remember now which side did get in.”

Whether one is shocked or not by Rossetti’s indifference to
politics, in his own case it was certainly true that it was more
important for humanity for him to write poetry and to paint
pictures than it was to take any side in political debates.

It is essential for the welfare of mankind that the importance
of creative literature be continually emphasized. The highest
level of culture ever known in any one city was in Athens in the
fifth century before Christ, And indeed from 5 00 b.c. to 3 00
b.c., beauty and form in literature, architecture, sculpture, re-
ceived conscious emphasis. That golden age took art more seri-
ously than anything else. Sparta, emphasizing only “prepared-
ness,” succeeded in “conquering” Athens 3 but when the Spar-
tans destroyed the long walls, they released immortal beauty
into the whole world. What armed force could conquer Aeschy-
lus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Socrates? And in a cer-
tain sense these dramatists were more lasting even than the
great man of science who immediately followed them, Aristotle.
For today many things in the works of Aristotle could be cor-
rected — but not in Sophocles or in Euripides. They remain as
flawless as the Parthenon.

It is significant that this overwhelming emphasis on the es-
thetic came in an age of intellectual freedom, when the makers
of creative literature were free in expression and when people
spoke their minds in the market place.

There have been times in the past when literature flourished
in a government that was not democratic, but only when the
supreme power was definitely favorable to creative writers or
when it allowed them to depart and to live in countries that
were more free. The history of creative literature includes
many great works written in exile and, indeed, works written
in prison. The best thing that ever happened to John Bunyan
was his imprisonment, because it gave him the only leisure he
could find 3 and the government, instead of torturing him, al-
lowed him access to pen, ink, and paper.

Liberty is the heart of literature. Even in countries where

FREEDOM

436

the ruling powers happened to be favorable to literature and
especially to literature that had “no offence in it” the best men
preferred liberty, as they preferred freedom to splendor.

In Les Miserables one evening at the Club, Marius, the Na-
poleon-worshiper, wound up a long speech:

“Be just, my friends! to be the empire of such an emperor, what
a splendid destiny for a people, when that people is France, and when
it adds its genius to the genius of such a man! To appear and to
reign, to march and to triumph, to have every capital for a maga-
zine, to take his grenadiers and make kings of them, to decree the
downfall of dynasties, to transfigure Europe at a double quick-step,
so that men feel, when you threaten, that you lay your hand on the
hilt of the sword of God, to follow, in a single man, Hannibal,
Caesar, and Charlemagne, to be the people of one who mingles
with your every dawn the glorious announcement of a battle gained,
to be wakened in the morning by the cannon of the Invalides, to
hurl into the vault of day mighty words which blaze for ever, Ma-
rengo, Areola, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram ! to call forth at every
moment constellations of victories in the zenith of the centuries, to
make the French Empire the successor of the Roman Empire, to
be the Grand Nation and to bring forth the Grand Army, to send
your legions flying over the whole earth as a mountain sends its
eagles upon all sides, to vanquish, to rule, to thunderstrike, to be
in Europe a kind of gilded people through much glory, to sound
through history a Titan trumpet call, to conquer the world twice,
by conquest and by resplendence, this is sublime, and what can be
more grand ?’ 3

“To be free,” said Combeferre.

Henry A. Wallace

Secretary of Agriculture in the Government of the Unite A States

THE GENETIC BASIS FOR
DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM

I N this essay I shall deal especially with the subject of
“racism” — that is, the attempts of individuals in certain
groups to dominate others through the building up of
false racial theories in support of their claims. My discussion
also will include the role that scientists can play in combating
such false theories and preventing the use of these theories for
the destruction of human liberty.

Naturally, having spent some years in the field of genetics, I
would be the last person in the world to deny that heredity is
an important factor in the plant and animal and human world
around us. In recent years I have dealt more directly with
social problems, and I have been just as greatly impressed with
the part played by environment. But my experience in both
these fields has given me some insight also into the misconcep-
tions and limitations as to both heredity and environment as
factors controlling the destinies of human beings.

It may be worth while to review here briefly the old question
of heredity and environment, and see what is the consensus of
present scientific judgment on this subject.

Marvelous progress has been made in the field of genetics
in the years since MendePs law began to be put to work by
myriads of scientists unraveling problems of heredity. Our
knowledge of chromosomes and genes and the way they affect
the development of animals and particularly plants has been
helpful in increasing the efficiency of agricultural production.

437

FREEDOM

438

Much that has been done, not only in the development of strains
of livestock for the farm, but in the breeding of race horses,
dogs, and other animals, is due to the concentration of desirable
genes through selective breeding.

People naturally have said, “If such wonderful results can
be attained with plants and animals, why not breed a superior
race of humans?”

Efforts in this direction may some day be worth while, but
we should recognize today the meagerness of our knowledge
and the impossibility at present, so far as human heredity is
concerned, of translating even that meager knowledge into
practice.

We know that human heredity is transmitted through the
forty-eight chromosomes with which each baby starts its life.
On these chromosomes, which are found in every cell of the
body, are the beadlike structures called genes which in some
fashion determine the various characteristics of the individual.
From our genetic studies we know that in humans there are
perhaps 10,000 of these genes — governing not only physical
characteristics such as color of eyes and skin, but also mental and
emotional attributes. Obviously, in view of the life span of
human beings and the number of genes with which we must
deal, it is absurd from a scientific, to say nothing of a sociologi-
cal, point of view to expect to be able to breed a new race which
is superior in mental and moral as well as physical qualities,
even if we had many hundreds of years in which to work.

It might be possible to concentrate on some one characteristic,
such as tallness, and produce striking results in a few genera-
tions, in the way that livestock breeders have done through
selective breeding with colors of coat and other physical char-
acteristics that mark the breeds. Or we might be able to do
spectacular things in the way of musical ability, which we know
definitely is transmitted as a hereditary trait.

But as to the transmission of intelligence, our knowledge is
still very limited. During the last three years the Department
of Agriculture, in its experiment station at Beltsville, Mary-
land, has been studying intelligence and its associated charac-
ters in dogs, in an effort to learn to what extent these characters

HENRY A. WALLACE 439

are inherited and how they respond to different environmental
stimuli.

As measures of intelligence, six different tests have been used,
these being designed to measure such characters as learning,
obedience, and courage and the extent to which variations in
these traits affect sheepherding ability.

Tremendous variations in intelligence, as measured by these
tests, have been found to exist. Some dogs respond well to all
tests and others are distinctly morons. Others respond well to
one test, such as a test of courage or obedience, but fail on others.
One dog passes all the tests with flying colors but for some
reason is a failure when it comes to actual sheepherding. Like
some humans, he is good as long as he is passing examinations,
but a failure in the business world. Timidity may so affect the
behavior of an otherwise intelligent dog that it will fail com-
pletely in its other tests, yet the evidence would seem to indi-
cate that such dogs if properly handled may do exceptionally
well as sheepherders.

Experimental matings of the dogs are now in progress to
determine in what way such characteristics are inherited. It is
too early to know the outcome of these matings, but our results
so far show that great variation exists in these traits in all
breeds. It is evident from the results that breed differences do
exist with respect to certain traits. In the main, however, with
environment constant, we know that so far as intelligence is
concerned, there is much more difference between the animals
within the breed than between the breeds themselves.

Heredity is a fact, and we cannot escape its effects. But I
think any geneticist worthy of the name would agree that en-
vironment is also a fact, and that we cannot truly evaluate the
place of heredity unless we provide a favorable environment
for the chromosomes and genes to do their work. The inherited
character is the end result of the interaction of specific genetic
factors, or genes, under the conditions of the environment.
Years ago, when I was in college, the boys used to ask the
animal husbandry professor what cross produces the best meat
animal. He usually answered, “the corncrib cross” — in other
words, plenty of food. That applies not only to meat animals,

FREEDOM

440

but also to children, and explains why good diet is so important
in children’s growth and development. It also explains the
efforts of the Department of Agriculture to improve the diet
of our underprivileged children through the Food Stamp Plan
and other measures which are making the surpluses of the farms
available to consumers who need them most. We feel that good
feeding is more important than racial selection in improving
our national stock.

Numerous experiments have been carried on by geneticists
and psychologists to determine if possible the relative impor-
tance of environment and heredity, or nurture and nature. In
these experiments, various tests, including that known as the
I.Q. test, have been applied. One experiment, carried on in
Iowa, measured the I.Q. of children born of moronic mothers
so as to determine whether their I.Q. had been raised after
being placed in a favorable environment. Other studies have
been made with identical and fraternal twins, some pairs having
been reared together and others apart.

Walter S. Neff, of the College of the City of New York, in
his study of Socio-Economic Status and Intelligence , points out
that nearly all the differences in intelligence between groups
of children of the highest and lowest status is due to environ-
ment. This is his conclusion after a critical survey of the com-
paratively large amount of work done by various scientists. He
says that “it has definitely not been proved that social status of
the parent has anything to do with native endowment of the
infant. That a positive relationship later in the life of the indi-
vidual may develop is hardly denied. But all the summarized
studies tend to show that low cultural environment tends to
depress I.Q. approximately to the degree agreed to as charac-
teristic of laborers’ children, and that a high environment raises
I.Q. correspondingly. All, then, of the twenty-point mean dif-
ference in I.Q. found to exist between children of the lowest
and highest status may be accounted for entirely in environ-
mental terms.”

The truth is that, from a practical standpoint, we can do very
little to improve the heredity of human beings. Most of the
differences which are attributed to race are really due to social

HENRY A. WALLACE 44 1

or economic background, and we know positively that social and
economic background in the vast majority of cases has nothing
whatever to do with heredity. In other words, there is no rea-
son to believe that a thousand children from wealthy homes
on Park Avenue in New York City will on the average have
any more intelligence than a thousand children from poverty-
stricken sharecropper families from the South if both are given
the same food, care, and educational opportunity. There are
some environments in the United States which I suspect might
in certain cases cause a child sixteen years old to have an LQ.
of 60 and other environments which might cause the same
child at the age of sixteen to have an LQ. of 120. That would
be an extreme example, of course, but it illustrates my point,
which is that although we can do very little to improve the
heredity of human beings, we can do a great deal to improve
their environment.

The effect of environment on body size was brought out by
studies completed recently by the Bureau of Home Economics
in co-operation with the Works Progress Administration. Meas-
urements were obtained on 147,000 boys and girls distributed
in fifteen states and the District of Columbia. Thirty-six body
measurements including weight were taken for every child.

It was found that these children differed in body structure
from State to State. The children measured on the west coast,
for instance, are on an average larger than the children meas-
ured in any other section of the country. Children of different
social and economic groups were compared, and the results
showed that children of a higher income level were on the
average larger with respect to most measurements than children
of a lower economic level. In some instances, the social and
economic comparisons were made between and within regions.
The results were quite illuminating. Children of the higher
economic level measured on the west coast were found to be
larger than the children of the lower economic level of that
region. One might jump to the conclusion that the children in
the wealthier families had a better heredity. But the children
of the lower economic level measured on the west coast were
larger than the children of the higher economic level measured

FREEDOM

442

In the other region to which I refer. Unless we are ready to
concede that there are distinct hereditary differences among the
people of our several States, or that the differences can be
accounted for by selective migration, we must assume that the
variations in size are due to variations in environment.

Further evidence of the effect of environment is found in
observations of the Farm Security Administration concerning
underprivileged farm families. Economic handicaps resulting
from the tilling of submarginal land or too small acreage, from
one-crop farming, and from insecurity of tenure go along with
lack of education and poor health. Doubtless in some cases there
are also hereditary weaknesses, but we have reason to believe
that deficiencies due to remediable environmental drawbacks are
far more frequent than those due to hereditary tendencies.

I have discussed the question of environment in relation to
heredity at some length because it has a direct bearing on the
claims concerning superior racial stock — claims that have to do
not only with definite physical characteristics but also with the
less tangible mental and spiritual traits.

Such claims have been put forth in Europe within the last
few years as a justification for conquest and the suppression of
human liberty.

The fallacies of such claims as they pertain to any one group
of Europeans are readily apparent from a study of the purity
of European nationalities and stocks. To show just how far
from pure these stocks actually are would require a compre-
hensive analysis of the entire history of Europe. But even in the
absence of such a detailed study, their mixed or heterozygous
nature is apparent from the historical fact that conquering tribes
of Huns, Turks, Mongols, and other peoples moved across the
face of Europe and blended with such diverse groups as the
Armenians, Finns, Slavs, Greeks, and Germans. The introduc-
tion of the African Negro slaves and the intermingling of the
various local peoples of Europe also contributed to the mixture.
All of this intermingling brought about not only a diversity of
common physical characteristics but also the more important
psychological ones. Europe has been a vast “melting pot” for
the same peoples for the, past two hundred years.

HENRY A. WALLACE

443

The racial situation in Europe is so confused that even the
Nazi theorists have been appalled and have found it necessary
to retreat from the concept of a Nordic body to that of a Nor-
dic soul. Apparently it is necessary to infer that among the
leaders of the Nazis there are some typical Nordic souls ani-
mating some exceedingly non-Nordic bodies.

I do not wish to give the impression that the mixing, or
blending, of European stocks was undesirable. I do wish to
emphasize the historical fact that it occurred, and in the light
of this fact, to point out that it is sheer nonsense for anyone
to talk about the purity of any European stocks. Europe gives
us one of the best examples that we could have of a hetero-
zygous population. In its population are gathered together most
of the human genes of the world — genes that determine size 5
color of skin, hair, and eyes 5 intelligence, craftiness, feeble-
mindedness, and thousands of other characteristics.

Judging by our corn studies, which involve the actual crea-
tion of pure strains, as the Nazis apparently would like to do
with human beings, it would require at least seventeen genera-
tions, or five hundred years, of the closest possible kind of
breeding to get out of this conglomerate population anything
approaching purity. Corn-breeding work has taught us that
pure lines derived in this way are usually weak and require
crossing in order to attain vigor. The vigor of the human race
has continuously been sustained by crossings of diverse types.

It is, of course, undeniable that the idea of a racially pure
stock has great emotional appeal, and that for economic and
political purposes only it has been used very effectively to de-
ceive many people. But scientists should be the last to be
deceived by false racial theories based on emotional appeal and
fostered for political purposes.

There is really no such thing as a pure race, in the sense in
which the term is commonly used by fanatics. I like the state-
ment contained in a resolution unanimously passed by the Amer-
ican Anthropological Association in December, 1938, which
read: “Race involves the inheritance of similar physical varia-
tions by large groups of mankind, but its psychological and cul-

444 FREEDOM

tural connotations, if they exist, have not been ascertained by
science.”

It is not only in Europe that fallacious claims concerning
mentally superior racial stocks are made. In this country, much
of our thinking is based on assumptions that certain races or
racial strains are mentally superior or inferior. These assump-
tions crop out in discussions of voting rights, of immigration
policies, and of the sterilization of supposedly “inadequate”
members of society. I repeat, heredity plays its part in human
affairs. There are great differences between the heredity of dif-
ferent individuals, but as in the case of breeds of livestock de-
veloped for the same purpose, the differences between the
individuals within a given nationality or group are much
greater than the differences between the nationalities or groups.
Most of the assumptions commonly held about superior or
inferior human stock are not in accord with the findings of
science.

It is encouraging therefore to discover the balanced scien-
tific view of this question so well stated by a group of leading
thinkers in the “Geneticists 5 Manifesto 55 made public in Edin-
burgh at the time of the Genetics Congress held there in Au-
gust, 1939. This manifesto, accepting the existence of heredi-
tary differences between human beings as a basic premise, de-
clares that “the effective genetic improvement of mankind is
dependent upon major changes in social conditions, and correla-
tive changes in human attitudes, 55 and that “there can be no
valid basis for estimating and comparing the intrinsic worth
of different individuals without economic and social conditions
which provide approximately equal opportunities for all mem-
bers of society instead of stratifying them from birth into classes
with widely different privileges. 55 The manifesto calls for the
“removal of race prejudices and the unscientific doctrine that
good or bad genes are the monopoly of particular peoples or
of persons with features of a given kind. 55 It declares that
genetic improvement of the race cannot be achieved “unless
there is an organization of production primarily for the benefit
of consumer and worker, unless the conditions of employment
are adapted to the needs of parents and especially of mothers,

HENRY A. WALLACE

445

and unless dwellings, towns and community services generally
are reshaped with the good of children as one of their main
objectives . 57 And the manifesto concludes: “The day when eco-
nomic reconstruction will reach the stage where such human
forces will be released is not yet, but it is the task of this gen-
eration to prepare for it, and all steps along the way will rep-
resent a gain, not only for the possibilities of the ultimate
genetic improvement of man, to a degree seldom dreamed of
hitherto, but at the same time, more directly, for human mas-
tery over those more immediate evils which are so threatening
our modern civilization . 57

Those “immediate evils 77 of which the manifesto speaks are
all too terrifyingly real to be ignored. All of us have seen how
the fallacious doctrines of racial superiority have been trans-
lated into attempts to perpetuate or seize political and economic
advantage. In some countries of Europe, these attempts have
been completely successful, and personal freedom — Including
freedom of the scientist to follow his calling unhampered —
is gone. In the United States also, “racism 77 has reared its ugly
head.

For the combating of “racism 77 before it sinks its poisonous
fangs deep into our body politic, the scientist has both a special
motive and a special responsibility. His motive comes from the
fact that when personal liberty disappears scientific liberty also
disappears. His responsibility comes from the fact that only he
can give the people the truth. Only he can clean out the falsi-
ties which have been masquerading under the name of science
in our colleges, our high schools, and our public prints. Only
he can show how groundless are the claims that one race, one
nation, or one class has any God-given right to rule.

To disseminate the truth about this all-important question
is the first duty of the scientist. But his responsibility goes fur-
ther. He should without ceasing to be a scientist do his best
to bring about better social and economic arrangements. He
should throw his weight definitely on the side of making our
democracy a true democracy, so that every child and every
adult may have an equal opportunity to earn and enjoy the

FREEDOM

446

good things of life. In doing this he will truly serve science,
and he will truly serve humanity.

In this hour of world-wide crisis, it is time for men of science
to act. It is time for them to band together to spread far and
wide the truth about the genetic basis of democracy, and to
work together for a better environment so that our political
democracy and scientific freedom may survive.

J. B. S. Haldane

Professor of Genetics, University of London

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF
FREEDOM

T HE first essential in any scientific study is a possi-
bility of comparison. The measuring rod, the stop
watch, and the balance are at the very roots of science.
If our study of freedom is to have any practical results, we
must try to tackle the question, Is A freer than B? A may
be a bus-driver in New York, and B a bus-driver in Belgrade.
Or B may be a corporation vice-president, a poet, or A 7 s wife,
in New York. In almost every case we find the question unan-
swerable. A has more freedom than B in some directions, but
less in others. And the different kinds of freedom are incom-
mensurable. A can, if he wants to, read the works of Marx, and
can afford to go to the movies eveiy night, which B cannot.
But B can have a drink after io p.m. and can afford a garden
where his children can play, which A cannot. Who is to decide
which is freer? Our best plan will be to specify different pos-
sible fields of freedom, so that we may be able to carry out
comparisons within these fields. The overall summary will in-
evitably be subjective, but we can at least say that in some
particular respect A is more free or less free than B.

Besides asking whether A is freer than B, we can ask the
very important question whether A is becoming more free or
less free in a given respect as the years go by. I would person-
ally prefer to live in a country where freedom was increasing
from a rather low level to one where it was declining from a

447

FREEDOM

448

high level. This again is perhaps a matter of one’s own philoso-
phy. But certainly such trends cannot be neglected.

Our classification of the fields of freedom will inevitably
be somewhat arbitrary, and different classifications will overlap.
Thus let us see what is meant by religious freedom, which most
people in the United States honestly believe that they enjoy.
It means legal freedom to believe any of a fair variety of doc-
trines and to persuade others of their truth. There is also legal
freedom to attack the religious doctrines of others up to a
point. But you will find yourself in jail if you walk into a Cath-
olic church and denounce the worshipers as idolaters, or into a
Protestant church and brand them as heretics. You may prac-
tice religious rites if they are not indecent or dangerous to life.
But if you think you enjoy full religious freedom, try prac-
ticing the Hindu Laya Yoga in New York and see how long
the vice squad will leave you alone. Or bring over a crate of
rattlesnakes and try the Hopi snake dance, and see how many
laws you are breaking. As for the religion of the Latter-Day
Saints, which turned the salt deserts of Utah into a garden, one
of its main practices, polygamy, has been prohibited by the Con-
gress of the United States. The plain fact is that in any society
there has at most been freedom for a group of religions which
enjoin fairly similar standards of moral conduct. So it will be
logical to divide up religious freedom under freedom to com-
municate ideas, freedom in sexual relations, various kinds of
economic freedom, freedom of children, and so on.

Besides this horizontal classification, so to speak, there is a
vertical classification of freedoms at different levels. The most
fundamental level is the technical level. This may be Marxism,
but it is also common sense. There could be no freedom of the
press before printing was invented, because there was no press
to be free or unfree. Thus a technical advance makes possible
a new kind of freedom and a new kind of bondage. Given the
technical possibility, there must in general be some legal restric-
tions. In no country is the press so free that incitements to
murder the rulers of a state may be printed within it. Most
people will support this restriction. Besides legal restrictions

J. B* S. HALDANE 449

there are customary restrictions. Law permits me, but custom
refuses me, the right to walk about the streets of London in

“A scarlet tunic with sunflowers decked.

And a peacock hat with the tail erect,

Which might have had a more marked effect.”

In primitive societies there is no division between legal and
customary restrictions, and in England too gross a breach of
custom may turn out to be the crime of “insulting behavior.”

Economic restrictions on freedom are of primary importance.
A vast number of technical possibilities are only open to a
small minority. Very few people can own a steam yacht. Some-
what more can own a grand piano or an automobile. The all-
important liberty of communicating ideas is enormously re-
stricted by the fact that very few people are rich enough to
own a daily newspaper. Further, the development of technique
tends to increase economic restrictions on liberty, simply because
modern technical inventions embody a great deal more labor
time than most of those of the past. Augustus Caesar could
have more clothes and a larger house than an ordinary well-
to-do Roman. But, unless he had wanted to have a pyramid
built for him, he had few or no kinds of qualitative freedom,
beyond his special political freedom as Emperor, which many
other Roman citizens did not enjoy. Communists, who are often
regarded as enemies of freedom, lay great stress on the fact
that in practice many kinds of freedom, though not legally or
customarily restricted, are economically restricted so that they
are the privileges of a small minority. “Liberty,” they claim,
“is such a precious thing that it must be rationed.” Under social-
ism, as practiced in the Soviet Union, certain liberties, for ex-
ample the liberty to print or to voyage in a yacht, can only be
practiced by groups.

Finally we must consider internal restrictions on freedom.
These may be at a variety of levels which in practice we rather
arbitrarily divide into physiological and psychological, though
every doctor realizes that the distinction is seldom quite sharp.
Clearly a paralytic has less freedom than a man with full
power over his muscles. But most people would regard a man

FREEDOM

450

with a wooden leg as freer than a cocaine addict or a victim
of an obsessional psychosis which compels him to wash his
hands twenty times a day. Beyond this it is harder to go. We
all know people whose idea of “true freedom” is the following
of some very narrow path. We can hardly define psychological
freedom without venturing into philosophy. Freedom is some-
thing more than being able to do what one desires so far as the
laws of nature permit. The drug addict with unlimited sup-
plies of his drug is at least relatively unfree. His actions are
controlled by a single motive, and lead to madness and death.
A rich man who oscillates in a narrow orbit of office, bed, golf
course, and annual holiday in the same resort is controlled by
a narrow set of motives. He is relatively unfree because he
has been so effectively conditioned by society that he has no
will of his own. We need not however go to the other extreme
and hold up as an example of complete freedom the man who
never keeps an appointment or is faithful to one woman for
a month on end. The so-called Bohemian can be described as
the slave of his own caprices, and psychoanalysis would prob-
ably show that he is dominated by irrational motives of which
he is unconscious.

As a geneticist, I see the problem in this way. Every human
being, apart from monozygotic twins, has a unique genotype.
For example, my own genotype determines in me a subnormal
capacity for music and a supernormal capacity for mathematics.
Every genotype can be placed in many different environments.
In some the individual will develop its powers and act freely;
in others this will not be so. If I had been born into a musical
family and had had no opportunity of learning mathematics,
I should have been less free than I am. Some genotypes, such
as those which determine idiocy, can never attain to much free-
dom. A few, perhaps, can only find their realization in anti-
social activity, though this is doubtful. But in any modern
society a vast number of different activities are open. In so far
as the choice between these activities is based on genotypes we
can say that the society is free. Or to put it in another way,
that society is freest in which each individual is pursuing those
activities which give most scope to his or her innate abilities. I

J. B. S. HALDANE 45 1

am perfectly aware that Aristotle defined happiness as “unim-
peded activity.” It may be said that I am speaking of happi-
ness rather than freedom. The framers of the American Con-
stitution realized that they were closely connected, though I
suspect that happiness arises rather as a by-product from other
activities than from its own deliberate pursuit.

But we cannot leave the matter on this merely biological
level. I agree with Spinoza, Hegel, Engels, and Caudwell,
to whose analysis of freedom in Illusion and Reality I am pro-
foundly indebted, in defining freedom as the recognition of
necessity. This is obviously true in the technical field. As long
as men thought in terms of magic carpets, seven-league boots,
and angels who carried a house from Palestine to Italy, they
could not begin to investigate the necessities embodied in the
laws of physics. And until they did this, they could not build
railways or automobiles. It is also true in the social and political
fields. A free man willingly obeys laws which he recognizes as
just, that is to say, necessary in the existing social context. And
it is true in the psychological field. Here one is free so far as
one understands one’s own motives. In order to do this one
must not merely examine one’s own consciousness and so far as
possible one’s unconscious, but also the social system by which
one has been conditioned. A man who accepts his mother’s
moral teaching as the voice of conscience is no more free than
one who believes his sex hormones when they tell him that the
last pretty girl he has met is the most wonderful woman in
the world. The difference between a man and an animal is
largely a matter of consciousness, and the difference between
a psychologically free and unfree man is also largely a matter
of consciousness.

FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

Imprisonment is the very negation of freedom. And freedom
to go where one wants to is a very important kind of freedom,
if only because one can escape from many kinds of bondage
provided emigration to a freer country is possible. In the nine-
teenth century freedom of movement meant political freedom

FREEDOM

45 ^

for many millions of Europeans who crossed the Atlantic to the
United States. Today this is no longer so.

Freedom of movement depends in the most obvious way on
technical inventions, such as roads, the riding of animals, wheels,
harness, ships, railroads, automobiles, and aeroplanes. But this
technical progress has had two effects. It has made legal restric-
tions on freedom of movement necessary, and it has led to
economic inequalities. Bullock cart drivers on country roads
in India do not seem to worry much about the rule of the road.
A collision between two vehicles moving at three miles per
hour does not greatly matter. But somewhere about ten miles
an hour a rule of the road becomes necessary. At twenty miles
an hour the energy liberated in a head-on crash is increased
fourfold, and the rule becomes a matter of life and death. With
higher speeds an elaborate road code, and special police to en-
force it, are needed. That is to say, some legal restrictions on
freedom are the inevitable result of technological gains in free-
dom. In actual fact many of these legal restrictions result in
real gains of freedom. I can drive much faster because drivers
are restricted to one side of the road than I could if both were
legal. And being a rational man I recognize the necessity for
this restriction and gain in freedom by doing so.

I gain from other restrictions. The anarchist’s ideal would,
I suppose, be that anyone should be free to go anywhere. But
I am actually freer because this is not so, and no one has a
legal right to enter my house except with my permission or
with a warrant from the State. I should be still freer if I pos-
sessed a small private garden. But privacy can be carried too
far, and it is carried too far when one man can enclose a hun-
dred square miles of mountains for the purpose of shooting,
and keep the public off them. In this case, as in many others,
a considerable measure of equality is a requisite for freedom.

In practice, however, restrictions due to private property in
land are less serious than other economic restrictions. Most
people in Britain cannot move about as they would like to for
one of two reasons. Either they have a job, get only very brief
holidays, and, though they may have saved a good deal of
money, dare not leave their job for fear of losing it. Or they

J. B. So HALDANE 453

are out of work and cannot afford to travel* It is extremely
difficult to arrive at any data, but I am inclined to think that
the average man has a greater freedom of movement in the
United States than anywhere else, and that this freedom is in-
creasing most rapidly in the Soviet Union, where it is already
fairly high. This, if correct, is due to the great development of
transport and the high real wage in the U.S.A., and the sys-
tem of holidays with pay and workers 5 holiday resorts in the
U.S.S.R., together with the fact that as there is no unemploy-
ment there, workers tend to move very freely from one job to
another.

It is also due to the large size of these two states. It is ex-
tremely difficult to leave one’s country in search of work. And
in an increasing number of states one cannot take any large
sum of money out of it, so that in practice one can only travel
abroad on State business or business approved of by the State.
The difficulties of foreign travel have been increasing for the
average man since 1900. A rich man or a man with political
influence can fly half round the world in a week. But I can
remember when I could travel to most European states with-
out a passport, whereas now I must often waste days in get-
ting the necessary visas. Freedom in this respect is declining
rapidly. The restrictions are certainly mainly due to economic
causes. If, as seems likely, capitalism works progressively worse
as the years pass, they will increase. And it will become increas-
ingly desirable to be a citizen of a State covering a large area.
For this purpose, by the way, the British Empire is not a State.
One needs a passport or permit to travel to Ireland or Canada
from Britain.

As for the internal or psychological aspects of freedom of
movement, we are slaves of custom to a most surprising degree.
I spent three days this winter going up the principal moun-
tains of Wales in January, when they are covered with snow.
I met exactly two other parties, though the Alps were crawling
with Englishmen a year ago. And in certain types of society
there is a strong ideological objection to travel. It is instructive
to read the words which Dante puts into the mouth of Ulysses
in hell. In one of the greatest passages in literature he describes

FREEDOM

454

a voyage of exploration to South Africa. And he repents it.
Dante thought it was wicked to sail outside the straits of Gi-
braltar.

Very few people are explorers. A ban on exploration is no
infringement of the liberty of the vast majority of people. Yet
it may have a decisive effect on the history of a nation. The
present expansionist drive in Japan is largely a belated attempt
to overcome the handicap produced by the prohibition of for-
eign travel from 1636 to i860. A blow to the liberty of a very
small minority may be a blow to a whole people.

FREEDOM AS A CONSUMER

Every human being is a consumer, even if not a producer.
Every improvement in the technique of manufacture means
a potential increase in freedom of consumption. So does every
increase in real wages. Hence a comparison of the real wages
in different countries tells us a good deal about the amount of
this kind of freedom. Given the possibility of buying something
beyond essential food, clothing, and shelter, freedom depends
on the choice of commodities or services which is available and
the way in which the choice is actually made.

Legal restrictions may be few, as in the United States. (Some
people think that lethal weapons are too easily bought there.)
They may be very serious, as in Britain during war, when many
foreign-made goods are unobtainable owing to import restric-
tions. Over large sections of the world freedom of consumption
has been drastically curtailed in recent years in order to pro-
mote national economic self-sufficiency, or autarchy. Apart from
the question of books, which will be considered later, the most
interesting problem is that of alcohol and drugs. Heroin is an
unrivaled cough cure. I have several times taken large amounts
of it for a considerable period without developing the faintest
craving. Probably many others — perhaps a majority — -would
be none the worse if they could buy it freely whenever they
had a cough. But there are enough potential addicts to justify
its prohibition. Many people would prohibit alcoholic beverages
because when they are sold freely some people abuse them.

J. B. S. HALDANE 455

The attempt was a failure in the United States, but may suc-
ceed in India. No prohibition of this kind should be regarded
as desirable in itself. In fact, even if we agree that narcotics
should not now be sold freely, we may hope that our descend-
ants will one day achieve sufficient psychological freedom to
make free sale possible.

Custom, as well as law, plays a very big part in limiting
freedom of consumption. There may be a standardized type
of expenditure for a given class or profession. Thus until re-
cently in England the ritual killing of foxes, grouse, salmon,
and so on, at appropriate times of the year, was the hallmark
of respectability. At an earlier period a gentleman was ex-
pected to form a library. In the present age of transition Eng-
land is probably unusually free in this respect, freer than the
United States or France. On the other hand, as we shall see
later, England is one of the least free countries in the world
as regards discussion of the merits of consumable goods.

I think it probable that, owing to the high average real
wage, the United States heads the list as regards freedom of
consumption. This was almost certainly so during the epoch
immediately preceding the Eighteenth Amendment and the
economic collapse of 1929. Today there are so many families
with no margin for buying beyond the barest necessities that
it is not so certain. The most rapid increase, though from a low
level, is occurring in the Soviet Union.

FREEDOM AS A PRODUCER

I personally enjoy nearly maximal freedom as to how I
earn my living. I am paid to devote myself to a certain branch
of science. I give a few lectures and conduct research on prob-
lems which interest me. I have no fixed hours of work, and I
could take three months 7 holiday a year if I wished. Besides
this I earn some money by writing. But I do not have to sup-
port opinions of which I disapprove in order to earn my living.
In fact I combine a decent remuneration with free choice. A
few other intellectual workers are equally fortunate, but this
number is rapidly diminishing, at least in western Europe. How

FREEDOM

456

few paid manual or administrative workers enjoy this kind of
freedom is shown by the universal demand for recreation, i.e.,
an alternative to work and purely cultural activities, such as
listening to good music, and by the fact that many people
actually look forward to retiring from their work.

On the technological level freedom of production is being
rapidly strangled by the abuse of patent laws by monopolists.
In many industries the small firm is hopelessly handicapped
for this reason, quite apart from underselling and other activi-
ties of trusts.

Freedom as a producer means in particular freedom to choose
your occupation, freedom to regulate its details, and unless
the occupation is pleasurable, short hours of work and long
holidays. Where there is widespread unemployment there can
be no freedom of choice. A man with a job holds it like a bull-
dog, and does not try a number until he gets one to his liking.
Under capitalism the workers have little opportunity of con-
trolling their conditions of labor, though trade unions can
accomplish something, and as a voter the worker may be able
to help himself in a very indirect way. Where, as in Germany,
neither method is available, illegal strike action may still have
some effect. But direct control, as on a Soviet collective farm,
or to a less extent in a Soviet factory, is only possible under
socialism. Since hours and holidays are satisfactory in the Soviet
Union, and unemployment does not exist, it appears that man
is freer as a producer there than elsewhere. Since in all capi-
talist countries the independent producer is being more and
more completely eliminated, the prospects of freedom for pro-
ducers under capitalism do not seem to be bright.

FREEDOM AS A CAPITALIST

In Dante’s hell the sins of Sodom and Cahors were punished
by a shower of slowly falling flames. But while the former
class of sinners could escape them to some extent by running,
the latter, who were usurers, or as we should say, financiers,
were not allowed this privilege. However, usury is now per-
mitted throughout Christendom, and this freedom has been an

J. B, S. HALDANE 457

essential condition of the immense technical advances made
under capitalism. These advances are slowing down because
finance, which formerly served industry, is now strangling it.

In the Soviet Union the sin of Cahors is punished in this
world, and so are other activities by which one man appro-
priates what, according to Marxist economics, is the value cre-
ated by the labor of others. These activities include not only
usury, but private trade and the employment of others for
profit. The extreme form of the latter kind of exploitation,
namely, slavery, is of course almost universally illegal. The
antisocialist claims that a very vital kind of freedom has been
suppressed. The socialist retorts that this kind of freedom, like
freedom to drive on the wrong side of the road, is incompatible
with the fullest technical progress, and that those natural
powers which are developed in the capitalist can be used under
socialism in administrative posts. Outside the Soviet Union
freedom of trade and investment is at present being effectively
strangled in most belligerent and some neutral countries, ex-
cept for those very large corporations which to a considerable
extent control the States. It is hard to say where the capitalist
is freest. I should hazard a guess that Argentina stood some-
where near the opposite pole from the Soviet Union,

SEXUAL FREEDOM

The minimum amount of freedom compatible with the re-
production of the race was enjoyed in Paraguay, where the
Jesuits married off their Indian subjects without allowing a
choice of spouses. Marriage between different groups of the
population may be illegal, as in Germany and South Africa ;
it may lead to loss of employment, as when officers in the Brit-
ish Guards “marry beneath them”; or it may merely meet
with social disapproval. Divorce and remarriage are permitted
in most countries, though not, for example, in Italy.

Extramarital intercourse is rarely a crime, provided the par-
ties are of a certain age. However, adultery is liable to severe
punishment in India. And prostitution is criminal in many
countries, though only in the Soviet Union is the man con-

FREEDOM

458

cerned punished more severely than the woman. Intercourse
between two males is generally criminal (though not in Den-
mark), while that of women is rarely so. There is an equally
bewildering variety in the customary limitations to sexual ac-
tivity. In some circles within the same country monogamy is
rigid, in others people normally “live in sin.”

Almost everyone will agree that complete sexual freedom
(which I suppose would include freedom of rape) is undesir-
able. Dante and I (to mention no others) would say the same
of economic freedom. As regards legal sexual freedom Den-
mark probably heads the list of civilized states, while Ireland
ranks very low both as regards legal and customary freedom.
The high cultural level and the rarity of prostitution in Den-
mark seem to show that such freedom may be harmless.

The main economic bars to sexual freedom are unemploy-
ment and gross disparity of income. Both of these may lead a
woman to cohabit (whether in or out of wedlock) with a man
whom she does not love, but whose income is more secure or
larger than her own would be were she independent. It may
similarly, but more rarely, induce a man to marry a woman
for her money, or to live with her. This kind of check on
freedom is probably most pronounced in the “Latin” nations
and least so in the Soviet Union.

A discussion of psychological checks awaits the development
of a comparative analytical psychology.

FREEDOM TO COMMUNICATE IDEAS AND STATEMENTS

This field of freedom includes freedom of speech, of the
post, and of the press. Technologically it depends on the inven-
tions of writing, printing, telegraphy, radio, and so on, and on
the development of arts such as poetry, drama, and cinematog-
raphy. Incitements to certain crimes and grossly indecent
speech, writing, and art are everywhere illegal. Further, one
or more of the technical means of communication may be a
monopoly of the State or of big business. Thus radio is directly
controlled by the State almost everywhere in Europe, but not
in the United States. On the other hand the United States

J. B. S. HALDANE 459

film industry is probably more trustified than those of some
European nations.

The legal restraints may be by civil or criminal law. State
prosecutions of men for speeches and writings are rather rare
in England, though a Mr. Gott has several times been impris-
oned for rude remarks about God, and ten years ago com-
munist speakers and writers were constantly being imprisoned.
If Britain follows the example of France, this condition is likely
to recur. But as compared with many countries Englishmen
have a wide liberty of propaganda on general matters. For
example, in France the State forbids public statements in favor
of the Third International; in the Soviet Union, against it.
In England both are permitted, but favorable statements must
be cautiously framed.

In law there is extremely little freedom of political discus-
sion in England. Sedition is defined as a word, deed, or writing
calculated to disturb the tranquillity of the State, and lead igno-
rant persons to subvert the government and laws. In actual
practice you can say a great deal in ordinary times, and print
a great deal if you can get a printer. But in times of political
tension the law may be enforced against the opponents of the
government. Not of course against the opponents of the king.
In 1936 the Daily Worker , the communist party organ, was
alone among daily papers in suggesting that Edward VIII
might consult his own wishes regarding his marriage. The un-
doubtedly seditious and possibly treasonable activities of the
leaders of the Conservative party and the Church of England
which led to that monarch’s abdication were not, of course,
interfered with.

In the Soviet Union the position is the opposite. Legally
there is fairly complete freedom of speech. And actually there
is a good deal. I have heard a man say that he could not see
much difference between Stalin and Nicholas. A member of an
important Soviet merely replied that there was quite a big dif-
ference. But on the whole custom is more stringent than law;
so that there is somewhat less verbal political criticism than
in England, though much more than in Germany or Italy,
and perhaps more than in France. On the other hand the press

FREEDOM

460

has in practice little freedom in political matters. In fact in
Europe a press consistently opposing the government is only
found in Britain, Switzerland (and before Hitler’s invasion), in
Belgium, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries. In Switzer-
land, Holland, and Belgium, this liberty was largely restricted.
Thus among European nations, Britain enjoys considerable press
freedom in political matters.

On the other hand English civil law makes any statement
which could affect the financial interests of a well-to-do man
very dangerous. For example, a firm recently circulated a leaflet
to the effect that I habitually used a medicine which they sell.
I have never even seen it. I was told that the statement was
not a libel on me. I attempted to deny it in the press and even
to suggest that the firm had in some measure departed from
the strictest canons of morality in using my name. This sug-
gestion was held to be probably libelous, and no journal would
publish it for fear of an action. Finally one journal has con-
sented to publish a bare denial, without any comment.

Similarly it is extremely dangerous to make any attack on
the character of a rich man in public life. In consequence there
is an entirely erroneous impression in many quarters that Brit-
ish politics are less corrupt than those of France or the United
States. Attempts have been made to start consumers’ research
in Britain, as in the United States. But the law of libel prevents
this. Hence there has been a considerable deterioration in the
quality of some British manufactured goods in recent years
from the high standards of the nineteenth century.

To my mind the correct law would be fairly simple. Either
statements of a general character about commodities made with-
out any evidence being adduced in their support, such as “Guin-
ness 1 is good for you,” should be illegal, or, better, it should be
legal to make such statements and also equally unsupported
statements, such as “Bass 1 is bad for you, and Worthington 1
is worse.” At present, in commercial matters one can only
praise, and not blame. Given the further fact that advertisers
exercise a very strong influence over the policy of newspapers,
so that in practice numbers of advertisements appear in the

1 These are names of beers widely sold in England.

J. B. S. HALDANE 46 1

news columns, it will be seen that there is very little freedom
of criticism in commercial matters.

This kind of criticism appears to be highly developed in the
Soviet Union, particularly in such journals as Krokodil and
Ve chernaya Moskva . And indeed it is a necessity if socialism
is to be successful, since such criticism is a possible alternative
to competition for sales between different firms, as a means for
keeping up the quality of goods.

The freedom of the press is both legally and economically
limited. In most countries libel, whether seditious or not, is
more severely punished than slander. Everywhere technologi-
cal progress is tending to improve the position of the big daily
newspaper with a circulation covering a radius of 250 miles or
so from its press, as against the small paper. Hence large cap-
ital is needed to start a daily newspaper, and wholesale dis-
tributive organizations can be used, and are used in England,
to boycott any newspaper which criticizes the government too
severely. In practice this method, and the influence of adver-
tisers, means that in capitalist countries the circulation of social-
ist journals is very small compared with the number of social-
ists, even where such journals are legal. In the Soviet Union
any attempt to start an opposition journal would probably be
prevented by practical rather than legal difficulties.

The position as regards publication of books is roughly par-
allel to that of the press. In Britain the law of libel is the
main check. I have personally been prevented from criticizing
fraudulent claims made for foods and drugs, from suggesting
that certain doctors were incompetent, and from exposing pro-
Nazi activities of British Conservative politicians and writers.
The ban on indecency makes a scientific discussion of certain
branches of human physiology rather difficult. But it is not a
serious difficulty. On the other hand it is extremely severe in
Ireland and used with great effect. Books published in Britain
which are politically offensive to the government have long
been prevented from entering certain parts of the Empire, and
since the war their export to neutral countries has also been
stopped. However, as regards book publication Britain is in-
comparably freer than most European states.

FREEDOM

462

Other methods of disseminating opinion, such as the drama,
are often subject to censorship. This is so in Britain. At the
present moment for example, the censor, though he allows a
measure of antiwar propaganda on the stage, forbids all refer-
ence to the help rendered to Hitler by members of the British
government in the years before the present war. On the other
hand the censorship of indecent passages has been greatly re-
laxed of recent years, and almost all portions of the female
body are now legally visible on the London stage. This is
doubtless a gain of liberty for spectators, but hardly for girls
who lose their jobs if they try to exercise the liberty to keep
their clothes on. There is also a censorship of films in most
countries. These forms of censorship are strongly supported
by the Catholic Church, although of late years this body has
probably disseminated more indecent (and untrue) stories than
any other organization, mainly in connection with the Spanish
war. As a matter of fact the Republican government was rather
puritanical. The film censorship is everywhere strongly po-
litical.

The radio is generally a State monopoly. At one time the
British radio sponsored discussions on political, social, and
religious topics, but these were always censored to some extent
and were finally discontinued. It is now purely an organ of
government propaganda. The United States radios are very
much freer, though like the press their general political policy
is controlled by that of the advertisers. However, British lis-
teners are certainly freer than those of many other countries.
They are permitted to listen to the German radio (a freedom
of which I have not myself taken advantage for some months),
while Germans who listen to the British radio are imprisoned.

We see then that the liberty of the press which was gained
during the nineteenth century has now been lost in most coun-
tries, partly by direct government action, partly by the use of
the civil law, and partly by technological advances which have
favored centralization, and therefore control by big business.
On the other hand the radio and cinema have never achieved
so great a freedom as the press.

It is probable that the highest degree of freedom of com-

J. B. S. HALDANE 463

munication of ideas exists in Denmark and in certain parts of
the United States, notably in New York State, while the lowest
degree is to be found in Germany and Italy. This kind of free-
dom is a very important one, but intellectuals are apt to speak
and write as if it were the only kind. Actually an intelligent
but reactionary government will allow a large measure of free-
dom of press and speech, being well aware of the fact that dis-
contented people can “blow off steam” by this means without
causing any serious disturbance, particularly in countries such
as Britain with a long tradition of fairly free discussion. This
is all the more the case if they can control the radio, the films,
and the more widely circulated newspapers. For this reason
freedom of speech and press, though correlated with political
freedom, is not synonymous with it.

I have not mentioned the internal barriers to freedom of
expression. And yet they are of profound importance. Some
of us are no doubt congenitally incapable of original expres-
sion in words, music, photography, or any other art form. But
most psychologists, and most ordinary people who have had
sympathetic dealings with children, believe that the majority
of human beings could make some real contribution to culture
if they were put in the right environment. For some reason
or other

“Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.”

This may be due to economic causes. In the case of many
a mute inglorious Milton, the poet says that

“Chill penury repress’d their noble rage,

And froze the genial current of the soul.”

But as the rich and the moderately well to do are almost
as dumb as the poor, this is not the whole story. Probably
most people could express themselves best in some communal
activity such as symphonic music, drama, or dance. “Civilized”
society is well organized for mass production of commodities
and for mass consumption of standardized cultural commodi-
ties such as cinema films and phonograph records. But it is

FREEDOM

464

far less organized than most primitive societies for collective
artistic activity. Possibly the Soviet Union may be leading the
way here. My own opinion is that the prospects for artistic
activity are probably brightest in China, where art has never
been thoroughly commercialized, and if peace and security are
restored the natural artistic ability of the people will find a new
scope. And the genuine respect of the Chinese for intellectual
activity may make China in the future, as it has more than
once been in the past, the intellectuals paradise.

POLITICAL FREEDOM

On no aspect of freedom is there more confusion than on
that of political freedom. At one time it is taken to mean gov-
ernment by natives of one’s own country, rather than by for-
eigners. Yet there is more political freedom (though not very
much) in a province of British India such as Bengal than in a
“native state” with an absolute ruler, such as Hyderabad or
Nepal. It is also regarded as synonymous with democracy, and
the latter with parliamentary government, though the Greeks
who invented the word democracy (which meant government
of the people, by the people, for the people, which did not,
however, include women or slaves) had no parliaments. Finally
it is taken to mean the right of stating opinions on political
matters.

Nowhere in the world do these conditions exist in their
entirety. The first type is only possible in practice for powerful
nations. The members of smaller nations may easily find them-
selves in the position of citizens of Iraq, Estonia, or Cuba,
and this possibility increases with the development of trans-
port. Actually they are better off as members of a larger aggre-
gate in which they enjoy a measure of cultural autonomy and
equality of citizenship. It is useless for Welshmen or Geor-
gians to say that they are oppressed by English or Russians,
when Lloyd George, a Welshman, was chosen (and may con-
ceivably be chosen again) to rule England in a critical hour,
while Stalin, a Georgian, is the most important man in Rus-
sia. It may be that Welshmen would be freer if Wales enjoyed

J* B. S. HALDANE 465

as much autonomy as Georgia, but actually the Welsh national-
ist movement is not very strong. Where there is not equality
of this kind, nationalist movements certainly make for increased
freedom. This was, I think, the case in Ireland, and is in India.
On the other hand the nationalist movement of the Sudeten
Germans, which brought them under Hitler, diminished their
freedom.

The second type of political freedom is claimed for all kinds
of political systems. Even the Nazis claim that they enjoy
“true” freedom, because Hitler expresses the political ideals of
every true German. If so there must be a lot of untrue Ger-
mans. Now in the past there have been two main types of
democratic government, namely, the Greco-Roman and Amer-
ican types. In the former all citizens met together frequently,
listened to orators, and voted for or against laws. In the latter
they elect representatives at rare intervals, and these latter
legislate. I call this system American rather than English,
because when America became a democracy, the English Par-
liament was still elected on a very restricted franchise.

The obvious advantage of the first system is that the citizens
decide matters directly concerning them, and of which they
have immediate knowledge. Its disadvantages are, firstly, that
voting is public and intimidation therefore possible, and that
while well adapted for the government of a small city, it is
impracticable for a State, let alone an Empire. It was largely for
the latter reason that it broke down when Rome acquired an
empire.

The American or representative type is adapted for a large
State, but has the disadvantage that representatives can and do
break their election pledges, that the people can only vote at
rare intervals, and that in practice they have a choice only
between representatives of a few organizations (e.g., the two
great American parties), whose policies are framed in secret
by a small number of men. In the Soviet Union an attempt
has been made to combine these two types of democratic mech-
anism. The village Soviet has the advantages and disadvan-
tages of a Greek Assembly, whilst the supreme Soviet corre-
sponds to the American Congress.

FREEDOM

466

In theory this is an ideal system, but it is claimed that in
practice all power is in the hands of the Communist party and
its sympathizers. In practice, however, parliaments are also
controlled from outside. In 1921 when Mr. Lloyd George,
then Prime Minister of Britain, was displaying a certain rad-
icalism in his financial policy, the Financial Times asked, “Does
he and do his colleagues realise that half a dozen men at the
top of the big five banks could upset the whole fabric of gov-
ernment finance by refraining from renewing Treasury Bills?”
Certainly the Labour party realized this ten years later. “Up-
setting the whole fabric of government finance” is, of course,
not sedition!

In practice then the political liberty in a parliamentary
democracy is largely at the mercy of big business. But not
wholly so. Enough parliaments have annoyed big business to
render it necessary to suppress parliamentary government over
much of Europe. And not only in Europe. Newfoundland
was unable to pay its debts to Britain. In consequence “the
mother of parliaments” began to eat her children, and New-
foundland is now governed by British officials. It will be re-
membered that when Britain refused to pay its debts to Amer-
ica the British Parliament was replaced by an American
Governor-General !

The plain fact is that over most of the world such parlia-
ments as survive are as subservient to big business as is the
supreme Soviet in Moscow to the Communist party. And even
the most violent opponents of Communism will hardly claim
that big business is democratic. Nowhere in the world is there
political liberty as Jefferson conceived it, and as it actually
existed in the days before monopoly capitalism developed.
There is still a fair amount in parts of northwestern Europe,
the Soviet Union, the United States, the British Dominions,
and some Latin American republics. On the whole it seems
to be on the upgrade in the Soviet Union, China, and (with
intermissions) in India, but stationary or on the downgrade
elsewhere.

So long as the present class struggle goes on we cannot look
for any great measure of political freedom even in the inter-

J. B. S. HALDANE 467

vals between wars. Only a classless society which does not feel
itself menaced either from within or without is likely to develop
a true political freedom in which discussion is both legally
and economically free and constitutionally elected governments
are not overthrown by the violence or economic pressure of
minorities. We may look forward to such a day, but we must
not deceive ourselves into believing that comparative freedom
of discussion, pleasant as it may be for intellectuals like myself,
is synonymous with full political freedom. If the newspapers,
radio, and other means of large-scale propaganda are mainly
controlled directly or indirectly by big business, there is only
rarely need for the forcible suppression of opposition. But the
possibility of such suppression is always in the background.
Under the Emergency Powers Act of 1939 any British citizen
can be imprisoned without trial for an indefinite period. It
will be very surprising indeed if this act is not used to strangle
constitutional opposition. In England today political freedom
has de jure no existence at all, even if de facto a good deal
remains.

But if speech is still theoretically free, as indeed it is in the
Soviet Union, this is because speech is an obsolete method of
propaganda compared with radio and the press, and if our
oligarchs control the latter they can afford to allow a rather
moderate liberty of the former.

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

We saw at an earlier stage that religious liberty embraces a
very wide field. In the sense of freedom to propagate religious
and irreligious opinions and to perform rites which are not
held to be cruel or indecent, it is fairly widespread. However,
it is rarely complete. For example, a conscript in Britain must
register as a member of some Christian sect or as a Jew, for
the purpose of burial. Being neither a Christian nor a Jew,
I exploited the liberty available to me as a soldier in 1914-18
by registering as an adherent of several different branches of
Christianity, and of Judaism, on different occasions. Adults
are not compelled to attend religious ceremonies, though they

FREEDOM

468

are hard to avoid in the army* But children can be and are
compelled to do so in most countries, whilst in the Soviet
Union I understand that organized religious instruction of chil-
dren is forbidden. Thus in practice religious liberty is often
like that of Germany after the Reformation, when each petty
ruler was free to persecute his subjects if they disagreed with
his theological opinions. Every British father is a princeling
who can beat his children if they do not go to the church of
which he approves, or go to one of which he does not.

Religious freedom is seriously compromised where religion
involves ritual food or rest. It is very difficult for an orthodox
Jew to rest on Saturday in England or for an orthodox Chris-
tian to rest on Sunday in Russia. In fact full religious freedom
is impossible in an integrated community, simply because many
religions can only be practiced in their entirety when the vast
majority of a people hold them.

The minimum of religious freedom is found in some Mo-
hammedan countries such as Afghanistan, Persia, and parts
of Arabia, and in Spain. It is rather low where there has re-
cently been a violent reaction against religious intolerance, as
in Mexico. It is below the maximum where any form of reli-
gion or irreligion is associated with the State, as in Britain,
Italy, Sweden, and the Soviet Union. It may also be lowered
where a religion is associated with foreign influence, as is
Christianity in China. Here the Chinese, who are on the whole
very tolerant in religious matters, have forbidden mission-
aries to attempt conversions to Christianity because such activ-
ity is thought likely to break up the national unity.

The highest degree of religious freedom is probably found
in the United States, where the State is formally neutral in re-
ligious matters. But complete religious liberty is impossible,
simply because all religious bodies are somewhat intolerant
when their supporters control the government. They may be
very intolerant like the Catholic Church, or very slightly so, like
the Society of Friends, but they cannot from their nature be
completely tolerant.

J. B. S. HALDANE

469

FREEDOM OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN

The freedom of women has very little to do with the free-
dom of sexual relations. It is minimal in Mohammedan coun-
tries such as Arabia, Persia, and Afghanistan, where all women
are veiled and those of the well-to-do classes are imprisoned.
The impossibility of romantic love in such countries is com-
pensated by homosexuality. It is maximal in countries such
as the United States and the Soviet Union whose women not
only enjoy legal equality with men but are actually appointed
to responsible positions such as that of ambassador. Indeed in
the United States women’s rights are perhaps overdeveloped
in connection with alimony for divorced wives, which enables
a number of women to live an idle life at the expense of men.
The same type of male subjection is found in a less developed
form in England. Complete liberty and equality in this matter
can only be achieved where work is available for every able-
bodied adult.

Children enjoy little liberty where the family is patriarchal
and their corporal punishment is commonly practiced. State
education generally makes for greater liberty for children, who
often obtain a valuable political education by playing off their
parents against their teachers. In Britain the children of the
poor are far freer than those of the rich. A rich boy can be
birched on his bare back at Eton up to the age of nineteen,
and is then sent to a university where he is locked up every
night until he is twenty-three or so. In fact ruling classes, the
world over, are cruel to their own children. They have to be
molded into efficient members of the class, and must suffer in
consequence. The Hitler Jugend appears to be an attempt to
inflict the English public-school spirit on all the children of
an unfortunate nation.

Complete freedom for children is impossible, but children
can, in practice, be given freedom at a very early age if their
training is directed to teaching them the recognition of neces-
sity. This means that they must be allowed to see and feel
the consequences of their own actions, which will inevitably

FREEDOM

470

include some broken limbs and other injuries. If they are
neither bullied nor pampered they develop human personalities
at a very early age, and may be responsible citizens at the age
of seventeen.

It is particularly difficult to compare different countries as
regards the freedom of children. Child labor for long hours
at monotonous work is no doubt a negation of freedom. But
a boy doing interesting paid work for short hours is far freer
than one in a school learning dull and often useless lessons.

CONCLUSION

We have ranged over a number of fields in each of which
a greater or less degree of freedom is possible. Nowhere have
we found the problem simple. This is partly because one maffis
freedom limits that of another, so that most kinds of freedom
demand a measure of equality. If six bankers can control a
State, it is time that the bankers had less freedom. In fact
freedom in a class state means mainly freedom for one class,
and that generally turns out to be a poor sort of freedom. In
particular, if a ruling class is to be efficient, its members must
be severely conditioned in youth. On the other hand the over-
throw of the class state has meant in the Soviet Union a period
of “dictatorship of the proletariat” with considerable restric-
tions on freedom, and would probably do so elsewhere.

Three facts must be kept in mind. Even the freest of men
has been so conditioned that he does not notice the lack of some
freedom which a man born in another place or time would
regard as essential. This is why we are honestly apt to regard
our own country as “the land of the free and the home of the
brave,” when we see the restrictions to which foreigners sub-
mit without a murmur. Curiously enough the foreigners often
think the same when they visit our country. An intellectual
who is making a fairly good living often regards himself as
almost absolutely free. He is freer than many of his fellows.
But he is only free because his product, whether in science,
art, or literature, happens to find a market. When the market
changes, he finds that his freedom may be freedom to starve.

J. B. S. HALDANE 47 1

However, the market is not a natural phenomenon, like the
weather. It can be controlled, and although this involves some
restriction of freedom, more and more people are coming to
think that it results in a considerable increase of freedom on
the whole.

Secondly, freedom is positive as well as negative. Man is a
social animal, and human freedom can only be freedom in so-
ciety, that is to say, freedom to act as a social being. This is a
hard saying, because it means that certain kinds of freedom,
for example the freedom of a landlord to keep the public off
a hundred square miles of mountains or the freedom of a few
bankers to overthrow a government are antisocial. But it turns
out that they are antisocial just because they restrict the free-
dom of others. The Greeks had a word for the man who used
his freedom to turn his back on society. The word was
“ISiartrjg,” in English “idiot.”

Thirdly, freedom is not static. It is always finding new
fields. For example we are beginning to recognize the right of
animals to freedom. It is now thought wrong to chain up a
dog for life, though the anthropomorphism of our ideas on this
matter can be illustrated by the case of an eagle which recently
returned to its cage in the London Zoo after two days of mis-
erable liberty. Like everything that grows, freedom negates
itself. The individual lover of freedom may join an organiza-
tion which limits his own choice. Moreover, he is more likely
to find himself in prison than the man who always takes his
cue from the majority.

And the same is true on a larger scale. A war or revolution
fought for freedom means the temporary loss of a good deal
of freedom. In the long run the loss is generally more than
made good. But a social change, like a technological advance,
always means a loss of some former liberty. We must realize
that the freedom of one man may be the bondage of another,
that the charter of liberty of one generation may form the
chains of its successor.

I believe that a comparative study of freedom on the lines
which I have indicated would do a great deal to increase the
respect between different nations, many of which, if far from

FREEDOM

47 2

ideal, have at least something to teach others in this important
matter. It would enable us to see the beam in our own eye
before crusading to remove our neighbor’s mote. And a his-
torical study would show us the way in which freedom has
actually developed, and help all lovers of freedom to strive for
a real increase of that great good. The position of freedom in
the modern world is so precarious that its preservation and
extension require not only good will, but all the thought which
we can devote to it. The problem of freedom is not a simple
problem. Now as never before in history “Notre salut defend
de notre intelligence ”

5. THE ESSENCE OF FREEDOM

The Right Reverend Monsignor John A. Ryan

Director , Department of Social Action , National Catholic
Welfare Conference

RELIGION AS THE BASIS OF THE
POSTULATES OF FREEDOM

F OR the purposes of this paper a “postulate” may be
defined as a “supposition,” an “assumption,” an “essen-
tial prerequisite.”

The postulates of freedom, then, are those underlying prin-
ciples and facts which must be accepted if the belief in and the
defense of freedom are to be logical and rational. This does not
mean that no person can or does cherish freedom unless he ac-
cepts the postulates to be advocated in these pages pit merely
means that rejection of the postulates renders freedom logically
indefensible.

The chapter titles of this volume comprehend freedom in
all its elements, varieties, and relations. Although they do not
specifically mention the topic, more than one of the constituent
papers will probably give some attention to freedom of the
will. Freedom of the will is logically essential to all other free-
doms. That is to say, a person who rejects it, a person who does
not believe that he has power to choose between alternative
volitions and actions, between doing and not doing, cannot
logically believe in the existence of political, civil, economic,
or any other kind of external freedom. Whether he realizes it
or not, such a person must regard all these freedoms as illusory.
To be sure, the determinist, the disbeliever in free will, can
point to the palpable difference between personal freedom and
personal slavery ; between political liberty and foreign domina-
tion. Before January i, 1863, the majority of Negroes in our

475

FREEDOM

476

Southern States were slaves ; thereafter, they were free men.
Before September, 1939, the people of Poland were politically
free ; since the beginning of last October they have been polit-
ically subject to Germany and Russia. The determinist can
rightly assert that the freedom enjoyed by the emancipated
Negroes and by the people of Poland for almost two score
years before the Hitler invasion were palpable realities. He
can insist upon the obvious fact that the Negroes and the Poles
were in those respective periods free from certain external
restraints which bound them in their conditions of subjection.
While the common sense and consciousness of the determinist
make him aware of these facts, his disbelief in freedom of the
will logically compels him to maintain that freedom from
external restraint left both the Negroes and the Poles unfree
psychologically; for they were determined, compelled, by mo-
tives drawn from their character and circumstances to fight
for and to accept the external freedom which they enjoyed.
According to the determinist a similar statement must be made
concerning the slaveowners and Hitler; both were psycho-
logically unfree in their acts of suppression and repression.

What practical difference does this problem make? Im-
munity from the external restraint involved in personal and
political slavery is a genuine good, something worth striving
for and cherishing by the determinist no less than the indeter-
minist. As reasonably and logically as the latter, the former
can fight for and cling to this freedom. Undoubtedly so. The
only practical difference is that the determinist cannot attribute
to the oppressors moral blame or pronounce upon them moral
condemnation. If there be no such thing as free will, if the
slaveholder and Hitler could not avoid acts of tyranny and
oppression, then they cannot reasonably become the objects
of moral blame and moral indignation. They have no more
responsibility for their oppressive performances than has a lion
that swallows a lamb or a sleepwalker who goes out a tenth-
story window. If the will be not free, then no one is morally
responsible for his acts, be they good or bad. The men and
the nations that deprive individuals and peoples of freedom

RIGHT REVEREND MONSIGNOR JOHN A. RYAN 477

are no more justly liable to moral blame or condemnation than
the lion, the tiger, the earthquake, or the cyclone.

What practical difference does this make? Only so much:
if the will be not free, no ethical appeal can reasonably be
made to the oppressors of the poor, the political users of tyran-
nical force, the Hitlers, the Stalins, or the Mussolinis, to re-
frain from their suppression of freedom. They can all logically
reply that they are not free to refrain. On the other hand those
who struggle against oppression cannot logically have recourse
to moral indignation. Both groups are victims of forces over
which they have no control.

To be sure, the observation of William Ladd, Professor at
Yale University, remains as true today as it was when he made
it many years ago, namely, only a few persons deny freedom
of the will in theory and even these accept it in practice. In
their everyday conduct, judgments, and attitudes, they act as
though they believed in free will. Nevertheless, this contradic-
tion between theory and practice is not only illogical but pro-
ductive of evil effects. When men reject freedom of the will,
their belief in external freedom is inevitably weakened. If they
apply to political and civil situations the same assumptions and
judgments that they use in evaluating the private actions of
individuals, they are logically prevented from using words of
moral condemnation against men who destroy political or civil
liberty. They cannot rationally denounce the rape of Poland or
the “liquidation” of millions of citizens of Soviet Russia. If
they are true to the principles of determinism, their judgment
upon those outrages cannot go farther than this: “It is too bad
that Hitler and Stalin were inevitably compelled by character
and circumstances to fall under the domination of motives
which irresistibly force them to conquer and to kill. We cannot
really ‘blame’ them any more than we ‘blame’ a mad dog that
attacks human beings, or a swollen river that destroys property
and lives. In the latter cases the resulting deaths clearly do
not imply moral guilt in their causes. Similarly, the destruc-
tion of Poland and the assassination and starvation of Soviet
citizens do not connote moral guilt in Hitler and Stalin. Our

47^ FREEDOM

evaluation of their conduct must be stated in terms not of
blame but of regret.”

Such is the practical effect of denial of free will. To the
extent that determinists are logical, they are unable to con-
demn violations of civil and political liberty. To the extent
that they put logic aside and follow their native intuitions in
their attitude toward these violations, they can be as eloquent
as the believers in psychological freedom 5 but they do so at
the expense of their intellectual integrity and they expose them-
selves to the danger that sooner or later they will be affected
by this internal contradiction, with the consequent weakening
of their moral indignation against political and civil male-
factors.

What is the relation of religion to this situation? To what
extent is religion at the basis of this postulate which we call
free will? This is the connection: all the great religions, at
least all those of the Western world, assume and assert that
the human will is free. They all maintain that if the will be
not free, innocence and guilt, desert and demerit, praise and
blame, have no meaning. In creating and keeping alive the
belief in free will, religion has exercised vastly more influence
than all other social forces combined.

Based upon religion are two other important postulates of
freedom: namely, the moral dignity of the human person and
the essential equality of all persons. Being an elementary con-
cept, the dignity of personality is not susceptible of strict defini-
tion. Since it is not a constituent species of a genus, it cannot
be defined in terms of “proximum genus” and “specific differ-
ence.” However, its meaning can be made clearer by synony-
mous expressions. Human dignity, the dignity of personality,
means that the human being has intrinsic worth, that he is in-
trinsically sacred, that, in Kant’s fine phrase, he is “an end in
himself,” and that he is never to be treated as a mere means
or instrument to any other end whatsoever.

Human dignity is best understood when it is associated with
the term “rights.” Man possesses rights because of his moral
dignity as a person. No rights inhere in animals. According to
the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence “all

RIGHT REVEREND MONSIGNOR JOHN A. RYAN 479

men are created equal” and a are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights. ...” While the enjoyment of these
rights may be prevented by force, the rights themselves can-
not be destroyed or taken away either by one’s fellow-men or
by governments. In other words, men are endowed with natural
rights: rights which are born with them and remain in them
as long as life remains.

In a recent magazine article, John Dewey declares: “The
intellectual basis of the legal theory of natural law and natural
rights has been undermined by historical and philosophical
criticism.” Subjectively undermined, yes 5 objectively, no. A
denial of natural rights does not disprove their existence,
whether those who deny be journalists, college professors, or
alleged statesmen. Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and Rus-
sian Communism agree in holding that all individual rights,
personal, political, religious, and economic, are created by the
State and can be modified or taken away by the State. This
denial of natural rights is an essential element in the theory
and philosophy of all these political systems. Neither Nazi
Germany, Fascist Italy, nor Soviet Russia admits that indi-
viduals have natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.

For our present purpose, natural rights may be described
as moral claims to those spheres of action which are necessary
for the welfare of the individual and the development of his
personality. Chief among them are the rights to life, to per-
sonal integrity, to economic opportunity, to property, to a
reasonable minimum of education, to the expression of thought
and opinion by voice or by the written word, and to association
with one’s fellow-men in organizations. As social groups, men
have a natural right to determine the form of government
under which they shall live and the persons who shall rule
over them.

In passing, I should like to cite two very great men on the
right of self-government. In the Declaration of Independence,
Thomas Jefferson declared that governments “derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed.” Political power,
wrote Cardinal Bellarmine more than three hundred years

FREEDOM

480

ago, “resides immediately in the whole state, for this power is
by Divine law, the Divine law gives this power to no particular
man, therefore, Divine law gives this power to the collected
body. Furthermore, in the absence of positive law, there is no
good reason why, in a multitude of equals, one rather than
another should dominate. Therefore, power belongs to the col-
lected body.” This power, continued the Cardinal, “is dele-
gated by the multitude to one or several, . .

The bearing of natural rights upon freedom ought to be
obvious. Since rights are claims to spheres of action, they imply
freedom within these spheres. Each of the specific rights enu-
merated above connotes a specific kind of freedom. These free-
doms comprise: immunity from physical restraint and attack 3
immunity from physical interference and oppressive contracts
in pursuit of livelihood; immunity from physical and legal
interference in the acquisition and enjoyment of physical goods;
freedom to move about from place to place or from job to job;
freedom of speech, writing, and assembly; freedom of associa-
tion and organization and immunity from political subjection
and oppression.

Concerning freedom and rights in the economic sphere, an
excerpt from the decision of the Supreme Court in AU gey er v.
Louisiana is worth quoting here. The liberty guaranteed by
the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment com-
prises, said the Court:

. . . not only the right of a citizen to be free from the mere phys-
ical restraint of his person, as by incarceration, but the term is deemed
to embrace the right of the citizen to be free in the enjoyment of
all his faculties, to be free to use them in all lawful ways, to live and
work where he will, to earn his livelihood by any lawful calling, to
pursue any livelihood or avocation, and for that purpose to enter into
all contracts which may be proper, necessary and essential to his
carrying out to a successful conclusion the purposes above mentioned.

The foregoing statement omits a positive element of eco-
nomic rights and civil freedom. This positive element is not
found in the due process clause or in any other part of the
Federal Constitution. It is, however, included in the natural
law and is among man’s natural rights. It stresses opportunity

RIGHT REVEREND MONSIGNOR JOHN A. RYAN 481

rather than absence of restraint. It comprises all those social
and economic conditions which are necessary for a reasonable
livelihood and a reasonable development of personality.

The man who rejects human dignity and natural rights must
logically deny that any of the freedoms above enumerated have
compelling validity. While conceding that they are necessary
means to the welfare of the individual, he can deny that this
is a rational end. He can deny that the individual, his welfare,
or his development are worthy social objects. This is the posi-
tion taken by the adherents of totalitarianism. According to
this political and civil philosophy, all the interests and the wel-
fare of the individuals, political, economic, religious, and other,
are absorbed by and completely subject to the State or the polit-
ical government. This doctrine was not invented in Italy, Ger-
many, or Russia. It is as old as Hegel and far older. It was
explicit in the political theories of the ancient world, when, to
quote Lord Acton, “the passengers existed for the sake of the
ship.” In the nineteenth century it was held by many political
writers and came to be known as the theory of “the Omnipotent
State.”

There are men who reject both totalitarianism and natural
rights. These can rationally hold, as some of them do hold, that
the individual should be permitted to enjoy only so much free-
dom as is compatible with the interests of a powerful economic
or racial group, of a majority or even of a dominating minority.
Since there is no such thing as ethical values, the only proper
determinant of freedom is physical force plus cunning.

Now the chief interpreter, advocate, and champion of ethical
values is religion. It is religion that has been mainly instru-
mental in disseminating and keeping alive the doctrines of the
sacredness of the individual, of human rights, and consequently
of rational freedom. Religion has inculcated these doctrines
chiefly through its teaching on the creation and spiritual nature
of man. Religion proclaims that man was created in the image
and likeness of God, and that he is something more than an
animal since he possesses a spiritual and immortal soul. If the
soul of man is directly derived, evolved, from the soul of some
long-defunct animal, whether denominated an ape or an an-

FREEDOM

4 82

thropoid, then, of course, man has no intrinsic worth or sacred-
ness. If the Creator did not, at some stage of the evolutionary
process, breathe into the first man “a living soul,” then is the
human being no more sacred than an ape. Then may any per-
son reasonably be treated as a mere means either to the State
or to any person or group of persons who possess the requisite
physical power.

All these truths can, indeed, be discovered and maintained
by the unaided operations of reason. But this has been achieved
only by a select few of mankind. The great majority have ob-
tained and retained these truths under the guidance of religion.
So, we conclude that religion is the basis of that postulate of
freedom which we have been discussing in the immediately
preceding paragraphs 5 namely, the dignity, the intrinsic worth,
of human personality.

The third postulate mentioned above, the equality of all
persons, is complementary to the second. If all persons are of
intrinsic worth, then all are equal in this respect. All have
equal moral claims to be regarded as persons, equal natural
rights, and equal claims to those spheres of action which are
necessary for life and the development of personality.
Throughout history, this postulate has been the most effective
barrier to laws and social practices which would discriminate
against racial minorities and other weak social groups. It has
also been the most effective force in educating, stimulating,
and persuading men to struggle for conditions of social equal-
ity. To be sure, the doctrine of human equality has not suc-
ceeded in establishing these conditions everywhere, nor have
the professors of the doctrine always applied it in full measure
to the situations which they controlled or influenced. These
failures are human, caused by prejudice, selfishness, lack of
charity, and intellectual inability to draw the necessary prac-
tical conclusions from accepted premises. Nevertheless, the
amount of achieved human equality in the world would have
been infinitely smaller if the postulate that we are now dis-
cussing had not been widely accepted and cherished.

In so far as it has been accepted and applied, the doctrine
of personal equality, at least in the Western world, owes by

RIGHT REVEREND MONSIGNOR JOHN A. RYAN 483

far the greater part of its prevalence and effectiveness to the
teaching of religion. This is a commonplace of recorded history.
The postulates of human dignity and human equality reinforce
and in turn are strengthened by the principle of fraternity,
brotherly love, or charity. Since all persons have intrinsic worth,
since they are all morally equal, reason demands that they
should be so regarded by their fellows. Men should love their
neighbors as themselves, as persons having the same dignity,
the same rights, and the same needs. One of the greatest of
these needs is freedom, immunity from arbitrary interference
in those activities which are essential to life and the develop-
ment of personality. On the other hand, the principle of fra-
ternal love greatly strengthens in practice the principles of
human dignity and human equality. On this point, the follow-
ing sentences from the Encyclical of Pope Pius XI, Quadrage -
simo Annoy are pertinent and persuasive:

For, justice alone, even though most faithfully observed, can re-
move indeed the cause of social strife, but can never bring about a
union of hearts and minds. Yet this union, binding men together,
is the main principle of stability in all institutions, no matter how
perfect they may seem, which aim at establishing social peace and
promoting mutual aid. In its absence, as repeated experience proves,
the wisest regulations come to nothing.

While the principle of brotherly love is a part of the natural
law and is knowable by natural reason, it has been reinforced
and elevated by the teaching of Christianity. According to the
latter, love of the neighbor is akin to love of God. Christians
are commanded to love their fellows because these are adopted
sons of God. Obviously this commandment attributes to the
human person a dignity and worth infinitely higher than that
which he possesses as a human being. The latter dignity is
natural, the former is supernatural.

Whether the postulate of brotherly love be accepted in its
full supernatural sense or from merely natural motives, its
beneficent importance for freedom and the struggle for free-
dom is incalculable. And most of its prevalence, force, and
appeal is and always has been due to the teaching of religion.
While other religions have contributed to this result, the influ-

FREEDOM

484

ence of Christianity has been the most effective. By way of
summarizing the effect of Christianity upon the postulates of
freedom, I would quote the following statement from the
Apostolic Letter of Pope Pius XI, to the Catholic University
of America, October, 1938:

Christian teaching alone, in its majestic integrity, can give full
meaning and compelling motive to the demand for human rights and
liberties because it alone gives worth and dignity to human personality.

Freedom of the will, the dignity of personality, the equal-
ity of all persons, and brotherly love comprise, in my opinion,
all the important postulates of freedom. They are all based
upon and made logical and practically effective by the teaching
of religion*

Edgar Sheffield Brightman

Professor of Philosophy, Boston University

FREEDOM, PURPOSE, AND VALUE

I F there is anything that men value, it is freedom to carry
out their purposes. If there is anything about which mod-
ern science and philosophy have spoken with uncertain
voice, it is freedom, purpose, and value. In this yawning chasm
between theory and practice there have been born evil prac-
tices and false theories. When a psychologist like Wolfgang
Koehler can say that “there is no word which sounds so bad
to most psychologists as purpose,” 1 he is saying that psychology
is embarrassed in the presence of the most conspicuous fact
of human existence. What would a man be without his pur-
poses? Yet there are many thinkers who regard purpose as illu-
sion, mechanism as truth ; who treat freedom as epiphenome-
non, the gray matter of our brain as the true cause of all our
acts; who define value quite deliberately as “nonsense,” because
it cannot be verified as a complex of sense data.

Facts are, it is true, inconvenient; but they have a way of
revenging themselves on theories which insult them. There is,
for instance, a philosophy called physicalism, whose exponents
would reduce all statements to physical terms, and thus neatly
do away with all troublesome facts of subjective consciousness.
But this very philosophy is based on the argument that the
physical language is the only one that is universally suited to
intersub jective communication. St. George must keep the sub-
jective dragon alive in order to slay it.

1 The Place of Value in a World of Facts, New York, 1938, p. 55.

485

FREEDOM

486

Other philosophies to which freedom, purpose, and value
are inconvenient have been devised by thinkers who adopt
the method of analytic abstraction. Abstractions are necessary
tools of thought 5 without their aid we should always be con-
fronted by the whole of our experience as a solid chunk, indi-
visible and unintelligible. But though necessary, they are both
insufficient and misleading if they are not in the end related
to the living whole from which they had been divorced by
analysis. The abstract thinker seeks to discover what the world
(or some aspect of it) would be if X were not in it. Mathe-
matics, for example, defines what it would be if there were no
X — no sense data, and no freedom, purpose, or value except
the freedom to think purposively about mathematical values.
Very few mathematicians, if any, commit the error of forget-
ting that there is an X which they have omitted. There are,
however, some abstract thinkers who are so deeply perplexed
by the facts of freedom, purpose, and value that they try the
experiment of conceiving what the universe would be if sense
data alone were given, and X y everything characteristic of hu-
manity, were simply not there at all. One may, of course,
think of such a possible universe; one may believe in it; but
one may not reasonably regard it as an interpretation or expla-
nation of the X which from the start has been excluded from
it. We may, and for certain personal purposes, we must, ab-
stract from purpose and personality; but for the living whole
of truth we must, as individuals and as a civilization, return to
the fundamental facts which we have ignored or distorted.
Only in that return do we discover the true function of our
analytic abstractions and thus approach the rational unity of
experience for which every mind yearns and struggles.

I

It is always debatable whether definition should come at the
beginning or at the end of an investigation. How can we inves-
tigate without first knowing what our problem is? Yet, if it
is a problem, how can we know the definitions which solve it
until our work is done? The answer to this dilemma is that all

EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRIGHTMAN 487

definitions are hypotheses, subject to correction, and that a
writer is fairer to his readers if he makes no secret of such
definitions as he actually starts with. Let us then suggest work-
ing definitions of freedom, value, and purpose — purpose being
saved for the last because it is most difficult.

Freedom we shall treat as the experience of choosing from
among possible courses of action. This is close to Hans Driesch’s
concept of freedom as saying “yes” or “no” to a given content.
However, Driesch’s “yes or no” is ambiguous. It might mean
saying “I like it” or “I do not like it.” Such a yes or a no is
not properly a free act, for it is neither a choice nor a proposal
to act, whereas freedom is always both of these. In our defini-
tion, the word possible means thinkable and consistent with
the facts and laws of the field in which the choice is made. I
cannot freely choose to write English rather than Chinese 5 but
I can choose to write English rather than German, because I
know both languages. The word action refers to any change
of the contents or objects of experience which may result from
choice. Thinking, running, being silent, hoping, or speaking
would all be action, regardless of whether they are “mental”
or “physical.” All that is required of an act is that it effect
a change of some sort.

This definition requires a little further explanation. The
process of comparing and estimating the different possibilities
is called deliberation. Hence, normal freedom involves a ref-
erence to value — a standard of estimation ; the possibility must
be regarded as worth choosing. Further, if freedom is to func-
tion in the building of personal and social life, there must be
some way of making its choice effective. In other words, free-
dom is no mere introspective, “Yea, verily,” said to some con-
cept. It is a move toward the effective realization of that con-
cept. Freedom means interaction between the chooser and his
world; it means control of mechanisms by the act of choice.
When Socrates chose to drink the hemlock rather than to vio-
late the laws of Athens; when Moses chose to share ill treat-
ment with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures
of sin for a season; when Madame Curie chose a life of disci-
pline and poverty for the sake of the ideal of scientific research;

FREEDOM

488

or when Admiral Byrd immured himself alone at an outpost
in Antarctica — freedom was exemplified. On some level, every
normal human being exerts his freedom at least occasionally
every day of his life.

Value is a term used in many different senses — in mathe-
matics, in painting, in economics, in ethics, and in psychology.
For our purpose, we shall distinguish two meanings of intrinsic
values or ends. First, value may mean any conscious experience
of liking, preferring, or enjoying. Let us call this a value claim.
In so far as I like the taste of a liquid, I find value in it. The
experience of liking it is an experience of value. But the liquid
may turn out to be a deadly poison, in which case the survivors
would judge that I erred in my value claim. If I had known
the consequences, I should no longer have enjoyed the taste,
however agreeable to sense it might be. Secondly, value may
mean any conscious experience of liking or preferring which
survives critical inquiry into facts, relations, and reasons. Such
a value may be called (at least relatively) a true value or an
ideal value as distinguished from an untested value claim. Both
value claims and true values reside solely in conscious expe-
rience. Intrinsic value is no property of unconscious things or
processes or even of ideals. Ideals are simply concepts of a kind
of experience that would be valuable if it were actual and so
are purely instrumental to the intrinsic values of conscious ex-
perience.

Of our three fundamental terms, purpose is the most diffi-
cult. It is usually defined as an end or project not yet exe-
cuted . 2 Warren 3 adds that the thinker with a purpose is deter-
mined to bring about the situation. Warren gives as a second
meaning, “The end, real or apparent, toward the attainment
of which vital processes are co-ordinated.” Thus, we may view
purpose abstractly (in HegePs sense of the word) as the mere
end in view, or concretely as the organization of experience
toward that end. The concrete meaning is truer. To conceive
a possible end is not to have a purpose until we make every
effort to realize it. Hence, purpose is best defined as the con-

2 See Baldwin’s Dictionary , s.v.

3 Dictionary of Psychology y s.v.

EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRIGHTMAN 489

scious selection of a foreseen end, together with acts appro-
priate to the realization of that end. The purposing is not
merely the choice of the end; it is the entire process of organ-
izing experience under the dominance of the end. The end is
not merely a future state of affairs; it is the immanent form
and structure of the whole process. Mere wishing for the goal
is not purpose. Kant points out in Section I of The Fundamen-
tal Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals that the good will
is “not ... a mere wish, but the summoning of all means in
our power.” Purpose, however, is more than Kant’s good will,
for it requires more than the summoning of means; it requires
their actual use. An unfulfilled purpose is a bare intention, a
frustrated plan, the mutilated torso of a purpose. The purpose
is the propositum — what is actually set forth in action, not
merely in imagination.

The interrelation of freedom, purpose, and value we shall
call spirit. Freedom is freedom to purpose value. Purpose is
the free realization of value. Value is maintained by free pur-
pose. Spiritual freedom, purpose, and value — the core of hu-
man existence — are challenged, restricted, and imperiled by
many social, political, and intellectual currents of our time.

II

Although practical man has always been alert to the impor-
tance, the uses, and the limits of his freedom to purpose values,
theoretical man has been baffled by what does not lend itself
to direct observation by the senses and is not readily treated
in the laboratory. Theoretical man has, on the whole, mani-
fested a consequent indifference to his own essential nature. In
Greece he thought about the properties of water and air long
before he thought about the properties of mind; and modern
science began by banishing all purpose, since a search for final
causes confused science.

A survey of language shows that many of the terms used
by common men as well as by scientists and philosophers in
expressing their fundamental concepts are words which point
only to visual experience, away from the invisible experience of

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free, purposive valuing. It is true that to know ( gnoscere )
means to perceive either by the senses or by the mind, and that
perception (fer + capo) means any kind of thorough taking;
if we take experience thoroughly we must take freedom, pur-
pose, and value. But even theoretic man has preferred to take
experience easily and vividly rather than thoroughly and com-
pletely, and he has clung to the visual tradition, or, as it has
been called, “The Spectator Theory of Knowledge. 5 ’ A specta-
tor is one who looks; theory means looking; knowledge is the
only word here that originally allows a nonvisual experience.
Realism, of course, refers to the visible thing, the res. But even
idealism is named from the root 18, which means see. Intuition
(; intueor ) is simply looking at what is seen; vision, that sup-
posedly spiritual act, has no etymological touch of freedom,
purpose, or value — it means only seeing (video).

No matter how intellectual we try to become, we cling to
insight. We seem to walk by sight and not by purpose in our
etymology. If our insight reaches its highest level, it is syn-
opsis, in which the optical is evident (as vision is evident in
the very word “evident 55 ). The esthetic is often interpreted,
as by Kant, as having some relation to purpose; yet the Greek
word means only what is perceptible to sense. There is a certain
irony in the fact that as soon as Zweckmassigkeit creeps into
Kant’s esthetics it has to be purged by being labeled ohne
Zweck. Even imagination (imago , imitor ), which originally
referred only to likeness and might thus mean likeness in pur-
pose or value, quickly came to mean the seen likeness of a
visible object. A philosophy is a world view (■ vue ), that is,
something seen. Contemplation comes from contemflor (to
gaze at). Consideration is from considero (to look at closely);
an interesting hint at man’s early stargazing, for sidus (star) is
concealed in the word. A temple is a space marked out (cut,
from TSfxvco) for the purpose of observation by the augur. Even
the ultraphilosophical German w r ord Vernunft , which seems so
remote from pollution by sense, according to Hermann Paul
derives from vernehmen y which originally meant to see, al-
though it is now usually applied to the sense of hearing.

When Pitirim A. Sorokin, in his great work, Social and Cul -

EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRIGHTMAN 49 I-

tural Dynamics (Volume II, Chapter I), wishes to divide (an-
other derivative o£ video ) philosophical systems, he provides
(fro + video) three classes: the ideational, the idealistic, and
the sensate. His first two classes are in etymology exclusively
visual, although the sensate allows nonvisual perception. All of
his classes etymologically exclude freedom, purpose, and value.

This does not mean that humanity has been ignorant of all
experience except the visual. Yet it plainly does mean that man
has given visual sensation an inordinately large place, partly,
indeed, because of the great usefulness of vision to human pur-
poses. “Seeing is believing,” we say, although seeing alone
gives no direct information about freedom, purpose, or value.
Perhaps theoretic man has clung to vision because it is funda-
mentally spatial, whereas purpose is fundamentally temporal;
space is tangible and solid, whereas time is so evasive that even
George Berkeley became “lost and embrangled in inextricable
difficulties” when he wrestled with it, and Augustine knew what
it is only when he was not asked. But if space gives us structure,
time gives us function, and without temporal functions space is
abstract and useless, both intellectually and practically. Man is
struggling slowly away from bondage to the visible; yet if, in
German, he tries to speak of purpose, he calls it Absicht , again,
a sight. After all, seeing is simply staring. In itself, it is a
passive immediacy, with neither action, understanding, nor pur-
pose. The seeing eye may perceive change, but it initiates no
change. It is, to quote the odd title of a lecture by Professor
R. C. Givler, “The Round Glass Eye of the Absolute.” It sees
all, knows all, does nothing; such a seer is unmoved, but is
itself no mover, no purposer, no valuer. A view of the world
based on visual evidence alone misrepresents every moment of
human experience, including the actual experience of seeing,
which always includes some elementary purposing and valuing,
and often some freedom of choice. Humanity has stared long
enough. It has wrestled with what it has seen. Thinking man
has not wrestled sufficiently with free, valuable purpose.

Why has man so largely concentrated his science and philos-
ophy on visual facts, neglecting or subordinating the equally
certain and far more important facts of the realm of free pur-

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492

pose? Why has he so largely left freedom to random desires,
taste, or dogma? Is it perhaps because he prefers the certain
to the important, the necessary to the possible, the spatial to
the temporal, or the present to the future? It seems that the
history of man’s mind has been largely guided by a determina-
tion to value what is visible to sense, and therefore certain,
above all the free purposes and ideals, which alone justify any
value judgment whatever. That is to say, the positivistic pref-
erence for the visible and rejection of values as “nonsense” rest
on an uncritical and incoherent value judgment 5 for if I am
warranted in valuing sense data, then valuing is itself war-
ranted. Yet it is on an arbitrary neglect of value experience
that much of our thinking is grounded ; from it arises not only
most of the conflict between science and religion, but also much
of the social and political conflict which is tearing civilization
apart. The choice of visual, spatial interests rather than free,
purposive, temporal interests, may be, as Fichte and Bertrand
Russell and others think, a matter of character or temperament.
Yet a thinker who can include all of the facts of experience in
his philosophy may judge which temperament is the more in-
clusive, and which the narrower in its empirical basis. He may
even criticize himself. We need a self-critical civilization.

The seer may see without acting; the purposer may see in
order to act. Paraphrasing the famous thesis of Karl Marx on
Feuerbach, we may say that science and philosophy hitherto
have seen the world differently, whereas the main thing is to
purpose freely that it shall become more valuable.

The primary fact, from which all facts are derived, which
all theories interpret, and from which all free action emanates,
is the fact of the total conscious situation which is a person’s
present experience. In that experience, vision, insight, and syn-
opsis are functions of the will to purpose values. Science is the
work of men rigorously and freely loyal to ideal purposes, love
of truth and of sound method. No analysis is fair to experience
until its results are related in a concrete synthesis with the total
value purposed by the free mind. Such a synthesis is implied
by the very nature of mind as the ideal fulfillment of its own
true purpose. The immensity of the human task is clear when

EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRIGHTMAN 493

we ask: How much of this synthesis of freedom, purpose, and
value with visible and sensible fact is now accessible to the
laborer, the employer, the businessman, the priest, the scientist,
the philosopher? Hitherto, only partial glimpses of the spatial
or of the temporal aspects have been achieved by the greatest
spirits. Should not this fact, instead of depressing the mind and
leading to pessimism, rather fill man with new hope when he
envisages the boundless development which lies ahead?

Ill

There is doubtless more justification for the neglect of free-
dom by theoretical man than has yet appeared in what has been
said. Freedom and purpose have often been not only irrelevant,
but even inimical to the search for truth. When new truth has
seemed to threaten ancient good, men have tried to preserve
the good by burning or crucifying seekers for the truth. Fur-
thermore, the lines between the realm of the visible and the
realm of freedom cannot be drawn easily and sharply; else
why have men so long been perplexed about the problem of
freedom? Why would a mind like Kant’s assign the visible to
phenomena and the free to noumena, and then later try to
smuggle in purpose by a third Critique? If the coast were clear
and the sailing plain, such exquisite subterfuges would not be
necessary.

Kant’s solution surely is not final. The visible and the free
can be completely severed only by wresting the free from its
home in time, and banishing it to a concentration camp out of
space and out of time, which Kant once, with unconscious
humor, called “das Ende aller Dinge” (“the end of all
things”). No, we cannot save freedom and value and purpose
by banishing them from nature and committing them either to
Kant’s noumena, to Santayana’s essences, to the positivists’ land
of “nonsense,” or to any other dungeon in an Ivory Tower.

We must seek freedom where it is — in the real world, the
very same world visible to the eye. In the actual world of our
consciousness at every moment we experience a pervasive and

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494

continuous mingling of the free with the unfree, the purpose-
ful with the purposeless, the valuable with the evil and the
neutral. No actual free act is wholly free. It is a choice within
limits rigorously determined by past experiences and present
environment. No purpose is wholly purposive; even in dream-
land, purposes must be an ordering of given brute facts which
were not made by any purpose, and which resist the desire of
purposers to destroy them. No value is wholly valuable; for
every actual experience of value is surrounded by enemies of that
experience — precarious accidents and exigencies which threaten
its continuance or which sap the resources of the valuer. Each
individual, himself both free and not-free, both purposeful and
not-purposeful, both valuing and not-valuing, confronts a like
strife in all his social comrades; and we all dwell in a realm
of nature which manifests like properties.

This complex human situation has led to the most conflicting
interpretations. Pessimists have seen the worm in every bud,
the universal opposition to free purpose. Optimists have seen
the universal presence of free purpose and value. But the only
thoroughgoing realists, as well as the only really adequate
idealists, are meliorists who see that everywhere there is prom-
ise of spirituality — of ideal values achieved by free purpose —
but everywhere spirituality finds visible nature present with it as
an inexorable limit. A limit, yes; but a limit that is as much
instrument and potentiality as it is obstacle and bar.

All our experience and everything that we can infer from it
is thus a mingling of the spiritual and the nonspiritual. The
creative aspects of reality — its free, valuable purposing — exist
within an uncreated framework that is given, a framework of
rational law and of brute fact. The framework is necessary.
There is no doubting either our logic or our sense data. A com-
plete knowledge of this framework would leave life dry and
clear, but aimless. Yet the lot of those who merely contemplate
the framework is far less pitiable than that of those who freely
pursue supposedly valuable ends without due regard to the
framework in which alone these ends can be realized. Knowl-
edge of the unfree, the purposeless, and the valueless is essen-

EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRIGHTMAN 495

tial to the actual free realization of values. What is given in
man’s spirit can never be spiritually controlled until spirit and
nature are wisely related each to the other.

IV

We have related the realm of vision to space and the realm
of spirit to time, contrary to the ancient tradition that identifies
spirit with contemplation of the timeless. This tradition is re-
jected partly because the only concrete meaning of the timeless
is what is true at all times $ partly because all contemplation,
even of the timeless, is an event in time 5 and partly because
freedom from time is a futile escape-mechanism as compared
with real freedom in time.

That time is integral to effective freedom is clear. True free-
dom is the choice of a valuable purpose and the process of carry-
ing it out. Time is the home of freedom and of purpose ; Sam-
uel Alexander said that “time is the mind of space.” The future,
with its inexhaustible potentialities, is the objective of all choice.
Free purpose in time is therefore the symbol of man’s infinite
perfectibility and is a ground for the confidence that no arbi-
trary barriers set by tyranny can confine the spirit or prevent
free planning for a better future. It was precisely when King
Manasseh was shedding innocent blood in the streets of Jeru-
salem that the prophets, doubtless in the concentration camps
of their day, were writing their constitution for the future
society in the book of Deuteronomy.

One difference between a small spirit and a large spirit,
between petty freedom and great freedom, may be fairly meas-
ured by the time span which the spirit includes and organizes
in its purposes. Memory is essential to the integrity and unity
of the spirit j a purposer who forgets the lessons of the past is
sure to have unwise purposes. But the most ample historical
memory affords no assurance of firm, long-range purposes un-
less it be supplemented by anticipation of the future. The pur-
poser is the explorer of the future. Every purpose is a venture
into the unknown. Prometheus is more daring than Epimetheus.
The purposer learns hard facts with the advance of time, yet,

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496

if he be rational, he never abates his loyalty to ideal values.
Although he cannot foresee what will befall him, he can foresee
what direction his free purpose will take, no matter what befalls.
The great spirit chooses a life purpose that no circumstance can
overthrow, yet will pursue it with a flexibility that adjusts every
circumstance to the purpose.

v

It would not, however, suffice to measure the free spirit solely
by the range of its purposive time span. Freedom faithful to a
distant goal is indeed impressive j but blind, uncritical tenacity
is mere obstinacy, becoming less and less virtuous the longer
it persists. Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, have taught
us that freedom is a good only in so far as it is rational. Irrational
uses of freedom must, it is true, be tolerated if there is to be
security for its rational use. Here is one of the many points
where a democratic society must allow evil in order that good
may come. If only rational freedom be allowed, freedom ceases
to be free and rationality ceases to be rational. To act only as
others dictate, however wisely they may dictate, is abdication
of personality.

Freedom and reason, however, remain vague abstractions
until they are defined. They are especially confusing if called
Freedom and Reason, with capital letters. Freedom we have
defined as the experience of choosing from among possible
courses of action. Reason has been used in so many senses that
it is a treacherous word. Abstractly, reason may be viewed as
the sum of all principles of logic. Concretely, it is equivalent
to reasoning — the process of applying logical principles to our
actual consciousness. More exactly, concrete reason is the move-
ment from a problematic, confused, or inconsistent conscious
situation toward a better-ordered, clearer, and more consistent
conscious situation. Mr. Dewey in his Logic denies that con-
fused situations can be cleared up by “manipulation of our per-
sonal states of mind ”; 4 in reply to which it must be said that
no clarification has ever occurred except by such manipulation.

4 P. 106.

EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRXGHTMAN

497

Omit personal minds, and what is left of reason and reasoning?

In a word, reason is the conscious movement from less co-
herence (less system, order, and connection) toward more
coherence (more system, order, and connection). Concrete rea-
son is not mere theorizing; it is an organization of our experi-
ence as a whole. One of its foundation principles is: Include all
the facts. “The true,” says Hegel, “is the whole.” Reason in-
cludes the discovery of the simplest parts of every complex
(analysis), of the relations of the parts (synthesis), and of the
properties of the whole which do not belong to the parts (syn-
opsis). Analysis without synthesis and synopsis increases ac-
curacy while diminishing adequacy. Synthesis or synopsis with-
out analysis is romantic fog. All stages of reason are essential
to its function.

It is now clear why freedom and reason are allies. Freedom
requires reason for its self-protection and its guidance. The
irrational “free” man is slave to the unknown. Reason, on the
other hand, protects man, as far as is possible, from enslaving
surprise. Furthermore, rational thought affords guidance to
freedom, revealing which ends are transitory and self-defeating,
which ends are permanent and self-sustaining. If reason guides
freedom, it also requires freedom for its very existence. With-
out inner freedom to think and outer freedom to express
thought, reason remains a barren and unreal ideal. The ab-
stract norms of reason are of no human importance unless men
are free to apply them concretely, so as to judge their senses,
their passions, and their world by the demands of inclusive
coherence — and then “remake it nearer to the heart’s desire,”
or, rather, nearer to the mind’s best insight.

Only the blindest can fail to see the peril in which the wise
and necessary alliance of reason with freedom, purpose, and
value stands today. The rising tide of irrationalism imperils
reason and freedom alike . 5 Reason itself, in so far as current
logical positivism is a form of reason, is betraying itself by
denying the possibility of a rational knowledge of values or

5 For excellent recent treatments of irrationalism see J. Seelye Rixler, The
Religion of a Free Mind, New York, 19395 and also the chapter on “Valua-
tions: Sentimental or Scientific,” Melvin Rader, No Compromise , New York,
> 939 *

FREEDOM

■498

purposes. The attacks on free reason from totalitarianism are
obvious. Less obvious, but more insidious, are the assaults on
reason and freedom in the democracies — assaults in the name
of patriotism, God, and the Constitution. Rational freedom may
be enchained by its zealous friends as effectively as by its zealous
enemies. The concrete realities of freedom and reason can be
preserved only by ever renewed struggles. What man is free
to gain, man is also free to lose. History must witness repeated
agonies of free spirit in strife with forces of mechanical, irra-
tional enslavement.

VI

It is not superfluous to add that freedom-purpose-value is a
social as well as a logical and an individual category. Significant
social expression is mostly the organization or conflict of free
purposes. No society could be built on merely visual percep-
tions 3 no social structure would ensue from bare exchange of
well-verified scientific descriptions of sensory facts. All such
exchange becomes social because of the relation of the facts to
some social purpose, if it be only the purpose to investigate.
Every society is a more or less free pursuit of common purposes
and values. Economic facts have profound social significance,
but only because of their function in promoting or obstructing
vital human purposes. A society, therefore, is never constituted
by purely economic categories. Likewise, “blood and soil” have
social importance only as race or land tend to help create or
destroy the values which free purpose seeks.

VII

Freedom-purpose-value is more than a social category 5 it is
also a metaphysical category. If we find a principle to be per-
vasive and essential in human experience; if we find reason and
social organization to depend on it; if science is an exhibition
of it; then we may well infer that such a principle is inherent
in the structure of the universe.

This is obviously no place for the construction of a meta-
physical system. Meanwhile it is appropriate to point out that

EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRIGHTMAN 499

no metaphysical system can be said to be adequately grounded
in experience if that system omits from consideration man’s
daily experiences of freedom-purpose-value and his fight
against the frustration of these experiences. Denatured facts
will yield only denatured metaphysics. To select unfree, pur-
poseless, and valueless facts exclusively is as irrational as it is
to select exclusively the facts of freedom, purpose, and value.
Hence a metaphysics based on actual experience can be neither
wholly spiritual nor wholly unspiritual ; but it may be wholly
personal if our personality is our total experience of tension and
struggle between the spiritual life and its given limits. Meta-
physics cannot offer ghostly, lawless spirituality; but it may
be an objective interpretation of what Kant called the primacy
of the practical reason . 6 The evidence of science is that law
prevails among the brute facts of nature; and free purposive
striving for value persists in every normal mind, however per-
verted that striving may become.

The central problem of philosophy first came to light when
Socrates turned away from the book of Anaxagoras because he
asked for the bread of mind and Anaxagoras gave him the stone
of mechanism. The actual world contains both bread and stones,
both purposive and visual experience, both the spiritual and the
unspiritual. The problem of metaphysics and of life is to dis-
cover and apply the true relations of these two factors, which
we have often wrongly contrasted as the ideal and the real.
The primacy of the spiritual over the brute facts of the un-
spiritual is a key to human and cosmic evolution. The unspir-
itual may be spiritualized, not by being explained away or
declared to be inherently spiritual and perfect, but by being
controlled through the persuasion of the spiritual.

VIII

Both among the very sophisticated and among the very un-
sophisticated one often hears the question: What is the purpose
of life? What is the value of living? What is this freedom for?

6 Emmanuel Mounier in A Personalist Manifesto , New York, 1938, has
spoken of “the primacy of the spiritual.”

FREEDOM

5 ° 0

The unsophisticated are inexperienced and have not tasted the
heights or the depths. It is natural that they should be vague
and hesitant when they hear conflicting reports from explorers.
The sophisticated are overexperienced. That is, they have had
too much experience of human trivia and vitia. Hence, in their
ennui, they are unable to see true value in the long perspective
of human and cosmic purpose. The sophisticated have become
sophists. They see, but they do not comprehend, the relativity
of all values. In truth, values are relative to free, rational pur-
pose. Those who actually devote themselves to the realization
of free, rational purposes find themselves in the immediate en-
joyment of present values and engaged in a quest for future
values. This enjoyment and quest are so intrinsically satisfying
that the inquiry about the purpose of life seems naive and al-
most laughable to one who is living value.

Yet after all the question is not laughable. It is serious and
tragic, for two fundamental reasons: Firstly, the conflict of opin-
ion about true value, and, secondly, the conflict of nature with
all value.

The conflict of opinion is not to be brushed aside. Plato and
Hegel were two of the world’s greatest and most rational minds,
and both were opposed to democracy. Thomas Aquinas and
Dante saw eye to eye about God, the ens realissimum and per-
fectissimum. Bertrand Russell and George Santayana find it
impossible to believe that God is reale, not to mention realis-
simum. To take another field, who can tell what art is so that
Phidias and Dali would agree? Could Thomas Jefferson and
Alfred Rosenberg come to a common definition of the good?
Conflicts of opinion concerning the fundamental ends of life
prevail among creeds, parties, nations, classes, races, and eco-
nomic systems. They manifest no tendency toward settlement
by treaties or leagues or academies. Spiritual peace in our time
is a mirage.

What has philosophy to offer in the presence of these facts?
Numerous considerations of pith and moment. First of all,
universal agreement has never been necessary to the supreme
enjoyment of value. The highest moments of life, indeed, have
something private about them. They are almost incommunica-

EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRIGHTMAN 5<3I

ble; at best they can be shared with but a few. Mystic ecstasy,
breath-taking beauty, or free responsible action come to the
soul with credentials that require no majority vote of the neigh-
bors for their endorsement. Some of the neighbors might only
profane the highest values. Secondly, there is, on the other
hand, a universal factor in all worthy purposing of value. That
factor is reason. As we have already seen, without reason no
human being can survive as a unity 5 without it his purposes
nullify one another, his values cancel out, his freedom becomes
inner anarchy. The law is inexorable: Seek reason or be con-
demned to spiritual self-destruction.

Thirdly, however, reason is compatible with magnificent
variety of purpose among individuals and cultures. Spiritual
value is not a fixed code of action on which all agree, nor is it
a rigid scale of items eternally better or worse than each other.
Spiritual value is rather the growth of the spirit in its individual
and social manifestations, in such wise that every conscious being
may preserve and develop what it experiences as truly worth
preserving. Thomas Aquinas and George Santayana may both
be spiritual men.

Fourthly, no responsible person will commit himself to any
purpose unless he has surveyed as widely as he may the rela-
tions of this purpose to other purposes, especially to the under-
lying purpose that has hitherto prevailed in his life. Out of this
survey, a new and richer unity may emerge, as it never could
from any hasty or forced agreement with the standards of
others.

This spiritual life, we emphasize, does not occur in a vacuum.
Individuals and their societies are surrounded by the energies
which we call nature. Nature kills, maims, frustrates, torments
the bearers of spiritual life. In fact, if one were to consider the
laws of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology abstractly,
without regard to the facts of value experience, one would
readily declare it to be a priori certain that such laws were
utterly foreign to purpose and freedom. But purpose and free-
dom exist, and an abstract view of the laws of science is there-
fore a falsification of experience. It is empirically true that na-
ture is destructive and that values are threatened daily by seem-

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ingly indifferent natural forces. True as this is, it is only part
of the truth, for it is also true that values, as the late Professor
Walter Goodnow Everett often said, are born in the womb of
nature. Nature sustains the existence of persons and their pur-
poses 5 makes planning for the future possible and often suc-
cessful; offers freedom a wide field of choice and of instruments
for the effective attainment of chosen ends. Nature is hostile
and nature is friendly. The counterpart of the conflict of nature
against values is the sustenance of values by nature. To strike
out both facts and declare nature neutral is a singular mani-
festation of fact blindness. No philosophy is true which neglects
either aspect of nature, much less a philosophy which neglects
both aspects. No life can be fully human which rests on illusions
that arise from forgetting facts.

Conflict remains. Freedom of purpose also remains. No phi-
losophy can be sheltered from the strife of nature and the strife
of purposes. It is in conflict that man’s spiritual values have
been achieved. Out of the dialectical tensions of spirit with
spirit, and of spirit with nature, there have grown art and
religion, science and philosophy, and noble character. Perhaps
Heraclitus spoke more wisely than he knew when he said that
strife (jcokjxog) is the father of all things. “It is king of all and
shows some to be gods, and makes some to be men — some
slaves and others free.” The universal conflict may be such that
eventually every spirit that wills to be free shall actually be
free.

IX

The Zeitgeist is not predisposed to spiritual personalism.
Philosophers and statesmen abound who regard all spiritual
synthesis as sheer fantasy. They call it impractical nonsense —
perhaps Jewish ideology, perhaps wishful thinking, or if they
are hard put to it for epithets, they brand it as theological. In
any case, the Zeitgeist is against the spirit as out of step with the
times, and as economically unproductive. What is more, the
spirit is against the Zeitgeist . What free spirit, purposing ra-
tional value, can view the current act of the human drama with-
out condemnation? Man as he is is surely something to be over-

EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRIGHTMAN 503

come. One need not be a partisan of Nietzsche to hope and
struggle for the coming of Beyond-Man, to whom the man of
today will be “a joke or a sore shame.”

Yet, if we hold that out of all conflict a new synthesis will
arise, we need not regard the present situation as desperate. On
the contrary, its strife may be a father of all things to coming
generations, if military madness does not exceed all bounds.
It is well for the spirit that it now lives in an age which chal-
lenges its very right to existence. If the spirit cannot meet that
challenge, it deserves to perish. “The unexamined life is not
worth living.” The challenge of our times to the spirit takes
the form: “Show us your papers. Tell us on what you base your
lofty pretensions. If you cannot verify your fine speeches, we
shall scrap you — we positivists, logical and illogical. We have
proved both by theoretical refinements and by coarse brutality
that your purpose and value and freedom have neither referents
nor military power.” It is true that nothing is more remote
from the logical positivists in their Ivory Tower than the intent
to support violence, yet there is a strange contemporary meeting
of extremes in the assault on the spiritual life, however unpur-
posed the attack on purpose may be. Can the spirit meet this
onset?

For its defense, spirit can rely on four items of experience,
which are no matters of opinion or theory, but matters of fact.
These items are: First, the presence of freedom, purpose, and
value in nearly all human conscious experience; secondly, the
fact that the three elements of spirit are presupposed by all
proof and verification; thirdly, the fact that all social communi-
cation involves them; and fourthly, the fact that they are the
ultimate source of the use and direction of physical forces in
human relations.

First, then, we are directly conscious of freedom, purpose,
and value in nearly every moment of experience— of freedom,
it is true, less continually than of purpose and value. Spiritual
facts are as directly experienced as are sense data. When I
choose to pick up a red rose rather than a green leaf, I experi-
ence my free choice as directly as I experience the red of the
rose or the green of the leaf. When I purpose to give the rose

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504

to my wife, that purpose, which means an orientation of my
total experience, is as certainly experienced as is the sensory
pattern of the rose. When I value the beauty of the rose’s form
and color, my value experience is as real as is my perception of
form and color. Incidentally, it should be remarked that it is
as impossible to translate freedom, purpose, and value into the
sensory language of physicalism, as it is to translate sense data
into the forms of freedom, purpose, or value. True philosophy
must synthesize, not reduce must save experiences, not destroy
any.

Secondly, the free purpose to achieve a valued end is a
necessary constituent of all proof and verification of every kind.
One can never verify any proposition without purposing to
verify, or without freedom and value in the choice of that pur-
pose. Every theory, and every test of every theory, is someone’s
free purpose to seek a value. Freedom is just as essential to the
testing of statements about sun spots, radium, or determinism,
as it is to the testing of democracy or tyranny.

At this point, someone is almost sure to remark that these
considerations may be an interesting play of dialectic, but are
lacking in cogency because they fail to take into account the
need for public verification. Logical plausibility, or even logical
necessity, has no bearing on the real world, the objector will
say, unless evidence is offered which is open to common, social
inspection. Surely I cannot inspect your freedom, your purposes,
your valuations, nor you mine. Hence they are not real.

This leads us to say, thirdly, that freedom-purpose-value is a
presupposition of all social structure and of all communication.
They are the social a priori. As John E. Boodin has pointed out,
purposes are really the ultimate social facts . 7 Society is at once
a co-operation and a clash of purposes. Without purpose, no ex-
perience is known to be public, no thought is communicated, no
sign is interpreted. Elsewhere, Boodin remarks that a theory
which excludes teleological motives may seem simpler, but
“lacks truth and reality.” 8 If William James was right in de-

7 J. E. Boodin, The Social Mind, New York, 1939, p. 228, and Chap. VI
on “Social Systems” entire.

8 Op. tit., p. 81.

EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRIGHTMAN $°$

fining every self as a “fighter for ends,” and in declaring that
“the only meaning of essence is teleological ,” 9 then individual,
social, and scientific experiences are alike impossible without
purpose. To call purpose a social a priori, therefore, is not to
appeal to an abstract theory, but to analyze experience. An act
of public verification is an appeal to the free purposes of others
to affirm or deny the item under discussion in the light of the
evidence to which purpose directs attention. Without such ap-
peal and free and relevant response to it, nothing could be
meant socially, or verified or refuted. The language of purpose
is a source of the meaning of all other languages, including the
physical. Your act of pointing at an object, for example, is a
futile gesture until I know your purpose in pointing. The cir-
cumstances may suggest a lucky guess, but the guess must be
about your purpose. If purposes are not public, nothing is public.

Fourthly, the most important item from the social standpoint
is the fact that persons who purpose values are the eventual
sources and directors of the use of physical force in human af-
fairs. Ever since the dimmest protohuman mind emerged from
its animal ancestry, there has been in man the conflict between
violence and persuasion as preferred means of gaining desired
ends. The serpent tried persuasion (in its lowest form, to be
sure) and succeeded directly with Eve, vicariously with Adam.
Cain, however, slew his brother and gained nothing but a repu-
tation as the first murderer. Since then, humane and spiritual
men have tried to be as wise as the serpent and as harmless as
the dove. They have engaged in unequal competition with men
of violence.

One might well suppose that violence would long ago have
exterminated all traces of reason, of character, of beauty, and
of worship, in view of the manifest inequality of the struggle.
In every generation prophets of evil arise who proclaim: “The
end is at hand, goodness has perished from the earth, with the
exception that I, even I only, am left.” Yet the historical fact
is that the end has never come. The most brutal of tyrannies,
the darkest of dark ages, the most deliberate persecutions and

9 W. James, Psychology , New York, 1890, Vol. I, p. 141, Vol. II, p. 335.

FREEDOM

506

inquisitions, have never broken the spiritual life of man nor
crushed his determination to persevere.

Why this impractical vitality of the spirit? We have already
hinted at part of the answer. It is incorrect to think of violence
and persuasion as utterly unrelated and opposed phases of expe-
rience. On the contrary, each of them is a stage in the dialectic
of spirit. Persuasion is plainly a level where social value is pur-
posed by appeal to the freedom of all members of the com-
munity and to their rational insight. Violence, however, is also
a means of social expression, as such, it, too, is a result of the
use of freedom. It is an instrument chosen for its supposed util-
ity in achieving ends regarded as intrinsic values. No one values
violence for its own sake, unless he is mentally diseased. Some
factor that disturbs the spirit — hunger or fear or ignorance or
desire for revenge — may lead men to set up goals that can
be attained only by violence. Yet when they use violence, they
are still free spirits, “fighters for ends. 35 The man of violence
is a free purposer of value, however tragically futile his use of
freedom may be, or however irrational his value judgments.

Herein lies man’s chief hope for the future. Violence can be
used by men only because the men are spirits in distress. A
bitter nay to the everlasting yea of the spirit is embodied in
violence 5 but that nay is itself also a yea of the spirit to the
spirit. Hate is an antithesis in the same spiritual movement as
the thesis of love. History shows that it is impossible for a
society to survive permanently if it “sticks in the antithesis. 33
The man of violence in the end cannot endure himself, because
he, too, is a spirit. Sooner or later he becomes conscious that his
weapons of force crush not only his victims, but also his own
spirit. Violence can be sustained only by the spirit and in the
long run the spirit cannot and will not sustain it.

Man must move on from the suicide of spirit by violence to
a synthesis in which the physical becomes the body and the in-
strument of the spiritual. This synthesis has been achieved in
many individuals. Society has yet to reach the stage where it
prefers the wisdom of disciplined freedom to periods of violent
self-destruction. Slowly, dimly, it is groping toward goals set
for it by the cosmic spirit.

John Macmurray

Professor of Philosophy > University of London

FREEDOM IN THE PERSONAL
NEXUS

t | HE traditional formulations of the problem of human

j freedom are so abstract that they have neither sub-

JL stance nor meaning. Or perhaps it would be more ap-
propriate to say that they have substance and meaning only as
it is lent to them by the personal interests and assumptions of
individuals, so that they change from generation to generation,
from country to country, from circumstance to circumstance. If
the issue is to be put in the way of solution we must begin by
determining what we are discussing when we discuss freedom.
This cannot be done by any mere definition of terms, which
would carry no further than the use of the word in the present
context. We must determine the locus of the problem in uni-
versal human experience. We must discover the center of dis-
turbance. We must put our finger upon the concrete origin of
the question, if it is to be real and not artificial j a problem of
life and not of language.

The traditional dilemma of free will or determinism is en-
tirely artificial, like most exclusive alternatives of a high order
of abstraction. If a rigid determinism obtained in the field of
human behavior there could, of course, be no choice 5 and
equally if a rigid freedom of will prevailed there could be no
choice either, since both alternatives would be equally open.
But it would be a waste of energy to pursue an abstract argu-
ment when it is easy to see by inspection that the debate is arti-
ficial. We need only suppose that we have accepted either al-
so;

FREEDOM

508

ternative, and ask what difference it makes in concrete experi-
ence. If everything is determined, it still remains unquestion-
able that a man is freer out of prison than in it; freer in Amer-
ica at peace than in Germany at war; freer in health than in
sickness, freer when he has money in his pocket than when he
is penniless. If man possesses freedom of will equally these
variations in freedom remain unaffected. The locus of the real
problem lies in these variations of human freedom under vary-
ing conditions. The question is not, “Are we free?” but “How
free are we?” It is not, “Have we freedom of will?” but “Un-
der what conditions have we most freedom of will?”

Men have craved for freedom, demanded freedom, and
fought for freedom. This proves that they have meant by “free-
dom” something that could be achieved by human effort; and
not something that we either have or lack. If the free-will con-
troversy were more than a scholastic wrangle, nothing could be
done about freedom, whichever of the two alternatives were
correct. This fact throws a curious light upon the metaphysical
controversy itself. If we can increase freedom by taking the
appropriate action, then freedom must be conditioned. It is
only by altering its conditions that we can increase or diminish
freedom. We can diminish a man’s freedom of action by locking
him in a room, and so changing the conditions of his action. To
say that anything is conditioned is to say that it is determined.
The conditions are its determinants. Thus what men have al-
ways meant by freedom is itself determined. In theory they
have assumed that if everything is determined there can be no
freedom. Yet what if freedom itself is determined? We tend to
think too easily that men long for a freedom that is denied
them by the forces of nature and history. Perhaps the opposite
is nearer to the truth. Perhaps man is only too anxious to
escape from a freedom which nature and history combine to
thrust upon his timidity. Perhaps we are destined to be free
whether we like it or not. To be free is to be responsible. To
evade responsibility is to flee from freedom. If it is true that
the inexorable laws of human development compel man to ac-
cept an ever increasing responsibility for his own destiny, then
freedom is determined at the metaphysical level, as an inevita-

JOHN M ACM XJRRAY 509

ble product of the laws of nature. In that event freedom and
determinism are implicates, not contradictories.

There is also a subjective factor in the problem which de-
mands preliminary attention. No one, I imagine, would con-
sider that we are not free because there are many things that we
are unable to do. A drowning determinist, clutching at straws,
would hardly contend that we are not free because we cannot
pay week-end visits to the moon. Freedom has clearly some
relation to our desires, and our desires have their roots in the
same nature of things that determines the possibilities of our
action. No man can intend to do what he knows or believes to
be beyond the bounds of possibility. It is doubtful whether we
can even seriously desire, for any length of time, what we
believe to be unobtainable. Freedom seems to lie in some ratio
between our desires and our capacity to satisfy them 3 between
what we can intend and what we can achieve. At least we may
satisfy ourselves that men experience the lack of freedom only
when their efforts are frustrated; only when they fail to achieve
what they believe to be possible. The social function of the agi-
tator, which has sometimes been of high importance in the his-
tory of freedom, is to persuade men to envisage, to desire, and
to demand a freedom that they do not possess. His difficulty
often lies in convincing the people that they are in bondage.
His success depends upon convincing them that the new forms
of life he proposes are really possible. The contented man is
free, as the sages have always told us, because his powers are
adequate to his desires. They have, perhaps, been too ready to
assume that any man can be contented if he chooses. Even if
he could, it is not at all clear that he ought to be. At any rate,
it is important not to overlook this subjective factor in freedom.
Men’s desires vary. Their conceptions of what is possible are
not fixed. Consequently, what is freedom for one man may be
slavery for another, and the vision of a new possibility may
turn freedom into bondage.

It would appear, then, that freedom, as we experience it,
resides in the adequacy to our purposes of our powers, oppor-
tunities, and means. Its opposite is the experience of constraint,
which arises when for any reason we must refrain from doing

FREEDOM

510

what we ourselves desire to do, or must do something other
than we would. But this general formulation is too wide for our
purpose. It covers checks to the spontaneity of our behavior
which appear as mere momentary vexations, no sooner felt than
overcome 3 as well as those major and permanent frustrations
that may make life not worth living. We have, as it were,
drawn a circle round the field within which the problem is to
be located. We must try to discover its center. We have in-
cluded all cases 3 we have to determine which are the crucial
cases. The answer which I wish to suggest is that the center
of the problem of freedom lies in the nexus of personal rela-
tionships, and that all other types of constraint are derivative
from the constraints of personal relationship, at least if they are
real.

Before explaining this view, it will be well to consider the
distinction between real and illusory freedom which I have in-
troduced as a qualification. There is, we have seen, a subjective
element in freedom, and it is, of course, on this account that
freedom can be illusory. But the distinction between Subjec-
tive” and “objective” must be used in this context with extreme
care. The ordinary distinction between the two is derived from
the reflective field, in which we “stand over against” the world,
in contemplation or in thought. In this attitude, whatever we
consider is independent of the processes of consideration. It is
“objective” in the sense that our activities of observing and
thinking “make no difference” to it. But freedom is not objec-
tive in this sense 3 neither is it a property or character of any-
thing objective. Freedom is a modality of action, and actions
are not contemplated but performed. Here indeed lies the
formal defect of the question, “Is the will free?” It postulates
an objective entity called “the will,” and inquires whether it
possesses an objective property called “freedom.” The phrase
“my will” stands for “me acting,” in contrast to “me observing
and reflecting.” Acting means realizing an intention, and an act
cannot therefore be merely objective. Neither can it be merely
subjective. It is a unit of experience which begins in the “sub-
jective” and terminates in the “objective.” It bridges the gap
between “mind” and “matter,” between the “self” and the

JOHN M ACM URRAY JII

“world,” between “ideas” and “things,” if indeed there is any
gap to be bridged. Freedom, as a modality of this transition
from subjective to objective, cannot be either merely subjective
or merely objective. We must guard against the tendency to
identify the illusory with the subjective and the real with the
objective in this context. All freedom has both a subjective and
an objective element in it, and these are not separable. They are
rather aspects of one and the same thing. We are not necessarily
free merely because we feel free } but on the other hand a con-
straint which is not felt is no real constraint. A contented slave
is still a slave, though his slavery is no bondage for him.} and
when the poet writes that

“Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage”

we understand what he means, but refuse to take his statement
au pied de la lettre. If freedom is to be real it must not be sub-
ject to destruction by a change of mood or an increase in knowl-
edge. It must be rooted, as a subjective experience, in the ob-
jective nature of things. Otherwise it is illusory.

We may distinguish two types of illusory freedom, which
we may call subjective and objective respectively. Freedom, we
may say, is subjectively illusory, if the absence of any experience
of constraint depends upon the absence of a desire to do what
one would be prevented from doing. It is objectively illusory if
the feeling of freedom depends upon a false belief in our power
to achieve what we desire. The stoic ideal of a freedom to be
achieved by getting rid of desire and “willing what happens”
is the apotheosis of subjectively illusory freedom. Kant’s effort
to equate freedom with moral obligation falls into the same
category. Desires which are suppressed do not cease to exist}
they are at best inactive in consciousness. The objective type of
illusory freedom is even more common. It exists wherever we
overestimate our capacities or our means} or are ignorant of
the obstacles in circumstances to the achievement of our inten-
tions. Corresponding to these illusory freedoms, there are il-
lusory constraints. We are subject to illusions of weakness as
well as of power} and we are afflicted with spurious desires,

FREEDOM

512

which lead us to demand impossible satisfactions that we do not
really want, and which, if we were to achieve them, we should
repudiate. The illusory character of such freedoms and con-
straints does not consist in their nonexistence or their ineffec-
tiveness. We are not dealing with ideas which have no counter-
part in the real world. In action the subjective does not confront
the objective as it does in reflection. Action passes from the sub-
jective to the objective. It is a process in time, with an inherent
reference to the future. The check to action which destroys our
freedom in action may come at any point in the process. Illu-
sory freedom is experienced as freedom. But it is incompatible
with its own persistence, and is therefore self-defeating. We
are not free to achieve the impossible. But we are often free in
actions which must inevitably lead to frustration, because their
objective, unknown to us, is in fact impossible. Such freedom
is properly called illusory, since it depends upon illusions, and
must lead to its own destruction.

With this distinction between real and illusory freedom in
mind, we may return to the central issue. Real freedom de-
pends upon the character of the nexus of personal relations in
which we are involved. This is the thesis which I wish to ex-
pound. It can be expressed and understood best by drawing
attention to the kind of experience of freedom and constraint
which it makes the center of the problem. If I am in the com-
pany of strangers whose good will is important to me, and
cannot be depended on, my conversation with them and my
behavior towards them suffer from constraint. I cannot express
myself spontaneously. I must think carefully before I speak,
and seek to make a good impression. I must act a part ; I cannot
“be myself.” If I leave this company and join a number of
intimate friends whom I know and trust, this constraint disap-
pears and is replaced by freedom. I can now allow my whole
self to appear. I can say what comes into my mind. I can be-
have “naturally.” I need not fear criticism, and so I can be
spontaneous, speaking and acting without an eye upon effects.
Here then is one familiar type of experience in which the con-
trast between “freedom” and “constraint” appears. My thesis
is that this contrast is the central one; and that when we wish

JOHN MACMURRAY 5 I 3

to go to the root of the problem of freedom, this is precisely
the sort of case which we should accept as a type instance, and
have in mind as an example. My reason for saying this is not
that there are no other types of cases which are important, such
as those which form the stock in trade of all discussions of
political liberty. It is that the type of experience I have chosen
involves, in principle, all the others 3 that if it is understood,
then all the others are, in principle, understood 3 if it is solved,
then all the others are soluble. The understanding of other
types, on the other hand, is not possible, or at least cannot be
complete, unless this type of case is understood 3 nor can the
problem be solved in the other types of instances unless it is
solved in this type. I believe, in other words, that the problem
of freedom appears at different levels of experience, and that
its solution at the upper levels depends upon its solution on
the basic level. And I believe that if we consider the problem
as it appears in the nexus of direct personal relationships, we
are attacking it at ground level 3 we are laying bare its founda-
tions. Only if we do this is it possible to envisage a radical solu-
tion. Even if such a radical solution is impracticable, it will still
enable us to understand what partial solutions are possible and
practicable at other levels, such as the political or the economic 3
and it will prevent us from expecting too much from reforms
that do not go to the root of the trouble.

In our effort to determine the general field in which the
real problem of freedom arises, we noticed that it was not the
mere absence of power that created the problem, but the ab-
sence of power relative to a real desire. We noticed further
that a real desire — the kind of desire that can give rise to delib-
erate action — depends upon a belief in the possibility of its
satisfaction. This involved a curious paradox. It would seem
that we can only experience a real loss of freedom in the pres-
ence of an impossible possibility. I do not mean by this that
we must believe something to be possible which is in fact impos-
sible 3 for this is the situation in which we enjoy a freedom
which is objectively illusory. We must find ourselves in a sit-
uation in which a real possibility is actually impossible to real-
ize 3 in which we believe, and believe rightly, that what we

FREEDOM

5H

desire to achieve can be achieved and at the same time cannot
be achieved. For it is only in such conditions that we can ex-
perience a real frustration of our will. It is only then that we
feel, and rightly feel, that we are frevented from realizing
our intentions, that we are deprived of our freedom.

How can such a situation arise? Surely any action that I
propose is either possible or impossible. At most, it would seem,
I may be mistaken in thinking it possible when it is impossible,
or impossible when it is not. Surely it cannot both be possible
and impossible at the same time. Logically, of course, it can-
not. But logic does not have the last word.

For our logical judgments depend upon the distinction be-
tween subjective and objective, which holds in the field of
reflection but not in the field of action. In reflection about the
nature of the objective world we are guided by the postulate
that all unreason falls into the subjective field; so that if any
illogicality comes to light it must belong to the processes of
thinking, and not to what is the object of our thought. But in
action the unreason of the subjective field is carried over into
the objective, and our mistakes are objectively revealed and
have an objective embodiment. If two of us differ in our con-
clusions about an objective question, then the disagreement
makes no difference to the fact; it merely shows that one of us
at least is mistaken, and ought to change his mind. The error
of another cannot here by its mere existence destroy the cor-
rectness of my own judgment. His inability to think logically
does not interfere with the freedom of my own processes of
thought. But when we pass from the sphere of thought to that
of action this immunity is left behind. For in action the irra-
tionality of others can frustrate the rationality of my intentions,
and my irrationality can frustrate theirs. If our intentions con-
tradict one another, they destroy each other’s possibility. What
is objectively possible becomes actually impossible. Wherever,
indeed, the achievement of an intention depends upon co-opera-
tion, the simplest of objective possibilities may be made im-
possible by the unwillingness of those concerned to co-operate;
and this unwillingness may, on occasion, rest upon completely
irrational and totally absurd grounds. The capacity of human

JOHN MAC MURRAY Jl 5

beings to “cut off their noses to spite their faces” is very high,
and it is not unusual to find a group of individuals who refuse
to co-operate in the achievement of an objective which all of
them desire, for reasons so irrational that they must conceal
them even from themselves. This is the resolution of the para-
dox of the impossible possibility which lies at the root of the
problem of freedom. It is the nexus of personal relationship
that is responsible for the variation in human freedom. We
can prevent one another from achieving our purposes, even
when they are objectively possible, and so limit or destroy one
another’s freedom. Moreover, this is the only way in which
real freedom can be limited ; for only thus can what is objec-
tively possible be rendered actually impossible. Only persons
can limit the freedom of persons. Any limitation of freedom
must have its source in us; in the character of our relation-
ships, as personal agents, to one another.

It is the instinctive recognition of this truth that links the
experience of a lack of freedom with the idea of oppression
and tyranny. When men feel the loss of freedom they behave
as though someone were responsible. They instinctively feel that
some individual or class is wrongfully depriving them of a
freedom which is theirs by natural right. The struggle for free-
dom is always a struggle against oppression. The oppressors
have defended themselves on the plea that the freedom de-
manded was in the nature of things impossible; that the con-
straint complained of was in fact illusory. In this instinct there
is a core of essential truth, however mistaken the accusation
may be in any particular case. If men feel the loss of freedom
they are always justified in looking for its source in the per-
sonal field. If men are not free, then they are oppressed. Their
inability to do what they desire is not a mere lack of power, but
a deprivation of power, for which the responsibility rests with
their fellows. The fact that we often make mistakes in assigning
the responsibility, that often indeed we are satisfied to wreak
our vengeance on any available scapegoat, is no argument
against this truth ; any more than the fact that we often assign
the wrong cause for an event suggests that it is causeless. We
are therefore at liberty to lay down a principle of far-reaching

FREEDOM

516

importance. The solution of any problem of human freedom
depends on the alteration of the relationships of persons. The
importance of this principle lies in what it denies. It denies
that any increase in power can solve the problem of freedom.
Indeed, an increase in power which is not accompanied by a
change in the nexus of personal relationships must inevitably
diminish freedom. For it enlarges the field of objective possi-
bility without altering the conditions of effective action, and so
widens the gap between what can be intended and what can be
achieved.

Consider two examples of this. The increase of scientific
knowledge during the past century has immensely increased
the range of human possibility. Much is really possible today
that was objectively impossible a hundred years ago. As a result
there has been a noticeable diminution of human freedom and
an increase of oppression. There is nothing paradoxical about
this. It is, in fact, just what must happen provided the char-
acter of the personal nexus remains, as it has remained, sub-
stantially unaltered. The increase in what is objectively possible
cannot be equated with an increase in freedom. It increases
the range and variety of the satisfactions that men can reason-
ably hope to attain. But if it leaves their forms of relationship
adjusted to a narrower range of actual achievement only, then
the effect is to diminish freedom. The subjective constituent
of freedom must not be overlooked. Freedom does not consist
in the objective existence of power, but in the possibility of
using it for desired ends. If a century of scientific development
has made it possible to raise the general standard of living by
20 per cent and it has actually risen only by 10 per cent then
in this respect there has been a restriction of freedom by 10
per cent. (The figures, of course, are not to be taken seriously.)

Consider, in the second place, the increase in oppression
which reveals itself in modern dictatorship. In olden times a
despotic monarch, however arbitrary and cruel, could interfere
with the freedom of his subjects only to a quite limited extent.
In a modern society with the same type of relationship between
ruler and ruled, the enormous increase in the range of human
power involves a correspondingly enormous increase in the

JOHN MACMURRAY 5 1 7

restriction of freedom. Not only is the tyrant’s capacity to inter-
fere with the activities of his subjects vastly increased, but the
range of possible satisfactions which he can deny them is also
greatly enlarged. Here again we see that an increase in objec-
tive possibility involves a decrease of freedom if the character
of the personal nexus in society remains unaltered.

It might seem that this leads us to endorse the view, widely
held at present, that freedom is a function of the structure of
society. This is partly correct, but only partly. The more impor-
tant corollary, which must be combined with this, is that the
structure of society is itself a function of the personal nexus of
relationship between its members. There is an ambiguity in our
use of the term “society” which is apt to result in a dangerous
confusion. In general, the term refers to that nexus of rela-
tionship which binds human individuals into a unity. The
ultimate fact upon which all society rests is the fact that the
behavior of each of us conditions the behavior of the others
and is therefore a determinant of their freedom. But the re-
sulting nexus of relationship contains two distinguishable ele-
ments in virtue of the types of motive which underlie the
active relationships involved. It is of the first importance to
recognize, and to bear in mind, that a subjective element
necessarily enters into all human behavior, and so into the
constitution of all human relationships. The elementary type
forms of these contrasted motivations are hunger and love.
Hunger is a motive which gives rise to actions designed to
appropriate something for one’s own use. Love, in contrast,
is the motive of actions in which we expend what is ours upon
something or someone other than ourselves. Both these types
of motive are necessary in the sense that they belong univer-
sally to the psychological constitution of human nature and are
inescapable elements in the determination of human behavior.
Both give rise to a nexus of dynamic relationships which bind
us together. The first type gives rise to functional co-operation
in work, and its basic forms are economic. The second gives
rise to the sharing of a common life. Since the term “society”
has in our day come to be so closely bound up with discus-
sions of the organized forms of political and economic rela-

FREEDOM

518

tionship, we had better specialize it for this use, and distin-
guish the forms of relationship which spring from the impulse
to share a common life by using the term “community” to refer
to them. The contrast to which our attention is now directed
becomes thus a contrast between society and community.

The exact difference between society and community and
the proper relation between them are best recognized by refer-
ence to the intentions involved. The intention involved in so-
ciety lies beyond the nexus of relation which it establishes. In
community it does not. It follows that society is a means to
an end, while community is an end in itself. This may be stated
from another angle by pointing out that a society can always
be defined in terms of a common purpose, while a community
cannot. Let us look, by way of example, at the simplest pos-
sible type of case, in which only two persons are involved. Two
men may be associated as partners in a publishing business.
They may also be associated as friends. That these two forms
of relationship are different, and at least relatively independent,
is shown by the fact that they may dissolve the partnership
and remain friends 3 or they may remain in partnership and
cease to be friends. Their association as partners is constituted
by a co-operation in the achievement of a common purpose.
Its form is dictated by this purpose. It involves a plan of co-
operation and a division of labor between them. In virtue of
this plan each of the two has a function in the business, in
performing which he contributes his share of work to the
achievement of the common purpose. Success depends on the
proper co-ordination of their functions; and if the plan achieves
this and each performs his function efficiently the partnership
is a satisfactory association. The whole nature of their relation-
ship as business partners is expressible in such functional terms
with reference to the common end to which the association is
the means.

Now consider their relationship as friends. We are not con-
cerned here merely with their feelings, but with the kind of
active relationship which is implied in their being friends.
Notice in the first place that this association cannot be defined
in terms of a common purpose. We cannot ask, What is the

JOHN M ACM URRAY 5 I 9

purpose of their friendship? without implying that they are
not really friends, but only pretend to be friends from an ul-
terior motive. A relationship of this type has no purpose beyond
itself. Consequently its form is not dictated by a purpose; it
does not give rise of necessity to a functional division of labor.
For the same reason it cannot be organized. Nevertheless it
is not motiveless. Its motive is to be found in the need to share
experience and to live a common life of mutual relationship,
which is a fundamental constituent of human nature.

We can use the same simple instance to help us to under-
stand the relationship of these two types of association. That
they are at least partly independent of one another we have
seen, since they may vary independently. But we must now
notice that friendship, though it cannot be constituted by co-
operation for a common purpose, necessarily generates such
co-operation. A friendship which did not result in the forma-
tion of common purposes and in co-operation to realize them
would be potential only. Indeed the underlying motive of
love is precisely to do something for the satisfaction of the
other, and its mutuality inevitably leads to functional co-opera-
tion. But there are important differences to be noticed. Since
the association is not constituted by a common purpose, it per-
mits of a change of purposes. In a partnership, if the common
purpose is dropped or becomes unrealizable, then the partner-
ship is at an end. Not so with a friendship. If the two friends
drop one common purpose for which they co-operate, it is
only to find another. In the second place, the common ends
which are worked for and the co-operation for their achieve-
ment are together means to maintaining and deepening the
friendship. From this we must conclude that in the nexus of
personal relationship community is capable of generating and
containing society within itself, of making the co-operation for
the achievement of common ends a means to itself and an
expression of itself. Therefore it is clear that if the problem
of community is solved the problem of society will be well on
the way to solution.

It still remains true that within limits at least society can be
independent of community. Our two men can be partners and

FREEDOM

520

co-operate in the work of running their business without being
friends. The necessity of making a livelihood, the pressure of
immediate self-interest, may be sufficient motives to maintain
the association. But there are limits to this. In the first place,
though their co-operation is theoretically possible in the ab-
sence of friendship between them, in practice the absence of
friendship limits the possibilities of effective co-operation in
many ways 5 while if strong personal antagonism enters in it
may easily render co-operation impossible. It may simplify
the issue if we remember that we are using the term friendship
to draw attention to the whole range of forms of relationship
which depend upon other-regarding motives $ that is to say,
upon motives which give rise to actions intended to affect the
lives and fortunes of others. Such motives range from mur-
derous hate, through a theoretical point of pure indifference,
to the love which is ready to sacrifice life itself for the profit of
the loved one. If we keep this whole range of behavior in mind
it is much less clear that functional co-operation is quite inde-
pendent of the more personal forms of relationship of which
friendship is our example. The more positive the personal in-
terest the easier, ceteris paribus y the co-operation must be. The
stronger the personal animosities between co-operating indi-
viduals the more difficult and inefficient the co-operation is
likely to prove. It is only at the theoretical point of complete
personal indifference that the co-operation is freed from the
influence of the more personal elements in the nexus of rela-
tionship. Such an indifference is psychologically impossible be-
tween people who are in direct contact with one another. But
it is possible and natural in highly organized societies, where
very few of the individuals co-operating can know one another
personally at all.

In the second place, any social organization is liable to be
hampered or even disrupted by the intrusion of personal ani-
mosities. The machinery of co-operation seems to work
smoothly only if the personal relations of the individuals con-
cerned are kept, as it were, at a level of low tension. The more
each one concentrates on doing his own part in the common
task the better. The more the relations between them are de-

JOHN MACMURRAY 521

termined by the common objective and the functional necessi-
ties of the plan of co-operation, the more efficient their efforts
are likely to be. In all forms of organized co-operation, there-
fore, there is a tendency to look upon the more personal forms
of relationship as a source of possible danger to the unity of
the group. There is a latent tension between the two aspects
of relationship. Society demands from its members a devotion
to a common end which transcends all “private” ends, and a
loyalty which is ready to sacrifice both oneself and one’s neigh-
bor to accomplish it. But from the standpoint of community,
such a demand is absurd and blasphemous. For its values lie
within, not beyond, the nexus of relationship ; and all co-
operation is a means of expressing the common life. Persons,
not purposes, are absolute.

It has been necessary to draw the contrast between those
two forms of relationship in the personal nexus because it is
vital to the problem of freedom.

Probably everyone to whom freedom is a practical issue
would agree that it only becomes a real issue when there is
oppression $ when somebody is putting constraint upon some-
one else and so infringing his natural liberty. This is to recog-
nize, of course, that the locus of the problem of freedom lies
in the personal nexus. From this recognition it is a natural step
to the view that the solution of the problem must lie in a
reorganization of society which will order the relations of indi-
viduals in such a way that the tyranny of one man over an-
other, of one group or class over another, is eliminated. All
the great struggles for freedom have taken their stand upon
this view. Yet when they have won their victories in the revolt
against this tyranny and that and have established the new
order for which they strove, the result has always proved a
disappointment to the idealists. Freedom remained obstinately
unachieved. Constraint and tyranny reappear in forms ever
more complicated and more difficult to deal with. Today, after
centuries of struggle and effort, it is at least doubtful whether
all the progress made has not left the majority of men less
free than they were in the days of serfdom and slavery y with
a wider gap than ever between their reasonable desires and

FREEDOM

522

the satisfactions they can actually attain. This is not to say
that there has been no progress. Progress has been immense
and in spite of the pessimists is increasing its speed every year.
The measure of progress is the increase in the range and com-
plexity of what is objectively possible for man. This has risen
so high that it is not absurd to say that already we are in a
position to eliminate poverty from the life of mankind. But
freedom is measured by the ratio between what is objectively
possible and what we can actually achieve. It looks as though
that ratio is lower than it has ever been in the history of civi-
lization. Two things seem to be true together in the strange
period to which we belong: that man’s power of achievement
has grown vast beyond belief $ and that his capacity to achieve
any serious human purpose is diminishing at an alarming rate.
It is an age at once of unparalleled effort and unparalleled
frustration.

The reason for this paradox seems to me to lie in our failure
to distinguish the two aspects of relationship in the .personal
nexus. Not only do we use the terms “society” and “commu-
nity” more or less interchangeably, but we tend increasingly to
think of the nexus of personal relationship as a nexus of organ-
ized co-operation. As a result we are bound to conceive the
problem of freedom as a problem of social organization 3 and,
since the central organ of social organization is the State, as
a political problem, to be solved by political means. The effort
to solve the problem politically can only have the result of
producing the organization of tyranny in the totalitarian state.

For consider. If a man is primarily a function in an organized
co-operation pursuing a “common” purpose, then he exists for
the group, as a means to the achievement of the common pur-
pose. This is equally true of all his fellows. He and they have
no more fundamental unity which might determine or modify
or in any way challenge the social purpose. It is this purpose
which determines them, sets them their places and their func-
tions. Only in virtue of this organizing purpose are they a
group. One is inclined to reply at once that this is clearly non-
sense 5 and indeed it is. But we must not locate the “nonsense”
in the wrong stage of the argument. If human society were

JOHN MACMURRAY 523

fundamentally a nexus of politico-economic co-operation, as so
much of our modern thought and practice asserts or assumes,
then any limitation of the claims of the group sovereignty upon
the individual would be ridiculous, and any freedom for the
individual would be accidental. The theory and practice of the
totalitarian state are direct corollaries of this characteristic
modern assumption. If, on the other hand, the individual has
any ground of claim against the State; if it can treat him un-
justly and deprive him of a freedom which is his by right of
nature ; then he is not primarily a functional element in an
organized co-operation. He embodies in himself, as it were, an
authority which limits and defines the merely political author-
ity of the organized society. Moreover, it is not as a mere indi-
vidual that he can claim such an authority; as a mere individual
he cannot even exist. It can only be as a member of a more
primary nexus of relationships than those of any organized so-
ciety, and in which the ground of all organized society is to
be found. This is the nexus of communal relationship, which
we here distinguish from the social nexus. We have thus
reached the point at which we can say that freedom can only
be maintained in this nexus of human relationship by main-
taining the primacy of the personal nexus of community over
the functional nexus of organized society. If this is secured,
then no doubt a well-organized society will provide greater
freedom for its members than an ill-ordered society. But the
most perfect organizing of society, if it involves the primacy
of the State, as the authority of organized society, must result
not in the extension but in the obliteration of freedom.

The problem of human freedom is then the problem of that
nexus of human relationships of which friendship is the type.
It belongs to the field of our direct personal relationships; not
primarily to the world of our indirect, functional, or legal rela-
tionships. This was the one point which I set out to maintain.
I may well conclude by showing that this means that the basis
of freedom is personal equality.

The essence of any friendship consists in the achievement,
in it, of a real sharing of life, of an effective mutuality of ex-
perience. This involves, of course, material co-operation, as we

524 FREEDOM

have seen. It is in this effort to achieve such a nexus of rela-
tionship between ourselves and others that we have our most
direct experience of freedom and constraint. Freedom is the
result in so far as we succeed. Constraint is the penalty, as it
is the proof, of failure. Freedom is the product of right per-
sonal relations. Constraint in the personal nexus is evidence
that there is something wrong with the relationships involved.
This “rightness” in such relationships is in fact personal equal-
ity. If there is constraint in a personal relationship there is a
failure to achieve and maintain equality. Unless people treat
one another as equals they are not friends. If one treats the
other as an inferior, then he is using him as a means, and the
friendship ceases to be a friendship. Thus personal equality is
the structural principle of relations which are communal in
type, while the experience of freedom in relations is their char-
acteristic expression. What throws the personal nexus out of
gear, and so introduces constraint and limits or destroys free-
dom, is always a failure to achieve or maintain personal equal-
ity. In other words, what destroys freedom is the will to power.
Where one man seeks power over others, where one class or
nation seeks dominion over others, the denial of equality in-
volved creates constraint and limits freedom. And there is no
way in which freedom can be restored or increased except by
overcoming the desire for power.

The conclusion is a negative one 5 and not particularly com-
forting. To all the plans for achieving or defending freedom
by political or economic organization it comes as a serious and
unwelcome warning. There can be no technique for achieving
freedom. The field in which freedom has to be won or lost is
not the field of economics or politics, of committees and rules.
It is rather the field which has hitherto been the undisputed
domain of religion. An age that has put religion aside without
even recognizing the need to put something in its place has
already lost the sense of freedom and is ripe for the organiza-
tion of tyranny. On the other hand, the will to power, though
it may infect an epoch like an epidemic, is still a disease. It is
not natural. And it may help us back to health to recognize the
disorder from which we suffer.

P. W. Bridgman

Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy,
Harvard University

FREEDOM AND THE INDIVIDUAL

T HE last thing that the average human being wants
to be made to see is that as a matter of fact he is
already inescapably free. This obviously does not mean
free economically or politically, for these forms of freedom
have not yet been generally attained and are still the object of
passionate endeavor. What is meant is that inner freedom in
virtue of which every individual leads his own life eternally
free from his fellows within the walls of his own conscious-
ness. So obstinate is man’s refusal to admit this elemental fact
that his social institutions and even his language, the tool of
his thought, have from time immemorial assumed such a struc-
ture as to obscure recognition of the fact and to make even
utterance of the fact well-nigh impossible. All the intellectual
machinery which an individual receives as his heritage and
with which he strives as best he can to adapt himself to his
environment is a tissue of rationalization inspired by fear lest
he see that he is really free. The oldest and the grimmest jest
that man has perpetrated against himself is the jest that Adam
and Eve in the Garden of Eden really wmted to eat the fruit
of the tree of knowledge.

Everyone soon comes to realize and accept certain special
aspects of freedom. Everyone who ever gets anywhere knows
that he has to make his own decisions for himself. Everyone
finds that no one is so much concerned with his own problems
as himself, and that if he wants to be sure of getting a thing

FREEDOM

526

right he has to do it for himself. He finds that he has no right
to the interest or even the sympathy of others. He finds that
whether or not he is free from other people, other people are
free from him, and that the various devices he employs to
control the actions of others are not necessarily successful. He
is not certain of getting safely to the other side if he walks
blindly across when the traffic light is in his favor, and if he
does not arrive safely it is really on him and not on the man
who has illegally run him down.

But although adaptation to certain of the aspects of freedom
has got into the unconscious practice of most people, an ade-
quate intellectual and emotional realization of the implica-
tions is most rare. We may attempt to obtain such a realization
by reflecting on some of the commonest features of experience.
No one would attempt to make a blind man experience one’s
sensations when confronted with a sunset. In a situation like
this it is easy to say that there is something incommunicable
about a sensation when the corresponding organ does not exist.
But when the organ does exist, is the sensation then communi-
cable? Does the red of the sunset sky appear to my seeing
neighbor the same as to me? What shall I do to find out?
Examination discloses that I can only analyze his behavior in
certain situations, including in his behavior his spoken words.
There is never a comparison of his sensation with mine. My
sensation is private, forever incommunicable. This is some-
times, but not often, recognized, as in a recent Reader’s Digest
one of the examples of “a more picturesque speech” was “pri-
vate as pain.” Because my sensation is private, “my sensation”
cannot have the same meaning as “your sensation,” so that it
is meaningless to ask whether your sensation is the same as
mine.

Here we encounter one of the obstinate infelicities of lan-
guage. “Sensation” is usually used without qualification by a
“my” or a “your,” as if there were a unique meaning, making
qualification unnecessary. But analysis shows that the situation
is irreducibly twofold. I know what I mean by “my sensation” ;
for my present purpose it is not necessary to analyze it further.
But what shall I mean by “your sensation”? When it comes

P. W. BRIDGMAN

527

right down to it, how do I know that you have sensations any-
way? Certainly what 1 do to establish that you have sensations
is different from what 1 do to establish that I have sensations,
and since what I do is different, the meaning is different. What
I do to establish that you have sensations is indirect and com-
plicated and involves argument of one sort or another with
myself. I see that you have organs similar to mine, and I ob-
serve that you behave similarly in similar situations. Would
I not then be merely going out of my way to assume that you
do not have sensations like me? The answer is that for certain
purposes I would be going out of my way to assume a differ-
ence between you and me, and because these purposes control
so many of the situations of ordinary life the convenience of a
single word is accepted. For a very important concern in most
of my contacts with my fellows is to anticipate how my fellow
is going to act, and the best way I have been able to invent for
predicting the actions of my fellow is to say to myself, How
would I act in a similar situation? of course modifying my
action to take account of such considerations as “if I were as
sick as he” or “if I were as stupid as he.” My answer as to
how I would act depends on what I imagine my sensations
would be. Hence it comes that what I mean by my fellow’s
sensations is what I imagine my own sensations would be in
the same situation. This act of imagining myself in the other
fellow’s place is done so easily that I forget what I am doing
and presently find myself using a single word, “sensation,”
covering both my and your, and still a little later materializing
my dualistic linguistic creation by attaching meaning to “sen-
sation” as such, unqualified by “my” or “your.” Hence we
finally come to handle “sensation” in a largely verbal way, to
gratify impulses of verbalization. This uncritical use of the
word “sensation” is not something that you and I have come
to by ourselves, but is something that we have inherited. But
however we came by it, there is no question but that we do
use the word in this way. If we did not, we would not in the
first place have tried to force into our question, Is my fellow’s
sensation of red the same as mine? a meaning different from
that which analysis disclosed.

FREEDOM

528

Language, then, presents sensation as something in common
between my fellow and myself, a bond of union, whereas my
sensation is inexorably private and eternally separates me from
my fellow.

“Sensation” has been used in a broad sense ; it includes not
only what is correlated with the conventional sense organs, but
embraces all that I understand by “conscious activity,” includ-
ing all conscious thought. There is grave danger here of being
misunderstood j “conscious” and “consciousness” have such a
history of metaphysical abuse, particularly by professional psy-
chologists, that implications are almost certain to be read that
I do not intend, or of which I am not even aware. My use
of the word is without these professional and conventional im-
plications. “I am conscious” is only another way of saying “I
think,” “I feel,” “I am aware.” I do not say that I have con-
sciousness j neither can I say without extension and alteration
of meaning that you are conscious. In the primitive meaning
there is as little sense in saying that you are conscious as in
saying that your sensation of red is the same as mine. For what
do I do to establish that you are conscious?

Most of the words with which I describe the actions of my
fellows are as irreducibly dual in meaning as is “sensation”
or “conscious.” These words have an altered and derived mean-
ing in addition to their primitive meaning, which is obtained
by imagining what I would be doing in the same situation. For
instance, what do I mean when I ask, “I wonder what you are
really thinking about?” Here, as in so many cases, we have
to distinguish between what the analysis, when we actually
carry it out, discloses must be the meaning, and the nebulous
anticipation that we usually have as to what the analysis will
disclose. It is often the latter that we have in mind when we
talk about “meaning.” I think an analysis will show that all
that I can mean by asking what you are really thinking about
is what I imagine I myself would be thinking about if 1 were
in the same situation as you, including in “same situation” all
the enormously complicated things covered by what I can
see, or hear other people say, or get you to say by question-
ing or other methods, including taking account of such things

P. W. BRIDGMAN

529

as your imagined inferior or different intelligence. But when
I have finished, I see that 1 have merely projected myself. I
think this result does not agree with what most people would
say their vague anticipations are as to what the meaning will
turn out to be 5 they probably anticipate that the analysis can
be made to disclose something in which there is no mention of
“me.” We can express the fact that the analysis does not come
out as we had anticipated by saying that it is impossible to give
the desired meaning to “your real thoughts” 5 we were trying
to impart a meaning that is impossible.

Common usage is infested with situations in which we want
to have certain meanings and in which we verbalize on the
assumption that these are the meanings, but in which analysis
shows that the desired .meanings are impossible. This is par-
ticularly true of almost all the “me-your” situations. For in-
stance, what is the meaning of “we”? We love to say “we”
and “our”$ it gives a cozy and all-together feeling that is most
comforting. Evidently what I mean by “we” is “you and I”}
this is to be said slowly so that one can appreciate that the “and”
in this expression is the “and” of merely formal conjunction
only. It is a symbol that one is to do two different kinds of
thing, one to the “you” part and another to the “I” part. Thus,
“we feel happy” is a contraction for “You feel happy and I
feel happy,” with a different meaning for “feel” and “happy”
in the two parts of the sentence.

There is one curious situation in which the usual relations
are reversed, in which I experience what is yours and never
what is my own. This is with respect to death. I know what
the death of animals and other people means; I have defini-
tions that tell me what to do to determine whether another is
dead or not. But this never applies to my own death, although
I always talk of my own death as if it were something on the
same footing as the death of another. We are careless of this
distinction, and perhaps partly because of it, although doubt-
less for other reasons also, we think of our death as a form
of our experience. This attitude toward our own death is I be-
lieve back of the many utter irrationalities of society in every-

FREEDOM

53 °

thing that pertains to death, and is therefore of enormous social
significance.

The dichotomy of meaning of all these words has been so
obscured by social and linguistic usage that many people find
it almost impossible to see what is behind the verbalism. And
because our language makes it difficult to see the dichotomy of
meaning, we find it almost impossible to realize the dichotomy
of the actual situation — the essential difference between me
and thee — the essential isolation of each of us from our fel-
lows. Right here is an example of the inaccuracy into which
our linguistic habits are continually leading us. Of course all
that I can say is that I am inexorably isolated from my fellows;
to say that my fellows are isolated from me or from each other
involves an extension and alteration of meaning like that we
have already analyzed.

There are at least two reasons why it is so difficult to realize
the underlying dichotomy of meaning in all these social words.
In the first place the technique of using words in this dual
fashion has been drummed into us by all our social training.
It was an invention of the very first magnitude when the first
man learned how to anticipate the actions of his neighbor
by saying to himself, How would I feel and act if I were in
the same situation? We, at this epoch, find it difficult to appre-
ciate the magnitude of this invention; the very meaning of the
subjunctive mood in which we express what we do; our “if I
were,” involves the invention itself. The invention was at first
a complex thing, demanding as part of it the simultaneous de-
velopment of a suitable language. But the invention having
flowered, it proved most congenial to the genius of the race;
it was no trick at all for one to imitate another as he saw
him use this invention. It has grown to enormous usefulness,
and is the universal and practically the only method by which
each of us adapts himself to the action of his fellows; it is
used in every act of social adjustment. No wonder that the
shorthand expression for what we do, namely, “My neighbor
has feelings just like mine,” should be accepted at its face value.
In fact, acceptance of it has been made into a social virtue, and

P. W. BRIDGMAN 53 I

the point of view becomes a primary motivation for acceptable
social conduct, as for example, in the golden rule.

The second reason we find it so difficult to realize the dichot-
omy of our language is that it is so very pleasant to ignore it.
The picture which fits in so easily with our language, namely,
of our fellows and ourselves all being similar pieces in one
large pattern, all having similar feelings and thinking similar
thoughts and appealed to by the same motives, is one which
is very pleasant for other than reasons of linguistic conven-
ience, for it harmonizes with our nature as social animals. We
like to be surrounded by our fellow-beings, and to feel that
we are all harmoniously striving for the same ends and afford-
ing each other mutual support. This feeling must go far back
into the history of the race, and must have been bred into the
race by the survival value of co-operative effort. The fact, then,
that linguistic convenience fits in so patly with the primitive
social urge makes it all the more inevitable that the linguistic
urge, with all its consequences, will be followed without crit-
ical analysis, for most people are incorrigible rationalizers.

It is very much the fashion at present to emphasize the po-
tency of the social motive in molding human institutions. But
I think the thesis can be and is carried too far, when it is
claimed, as so often it is, that the only important molding
factor has been the social. It is, however, natural that the thesis
should be overemphasized, because in so doing we satisfy the
fundamental craving for support from without. The sciences
are being contaminated by this overemphasis on the social fac-
tor no less than are the other disciplines; it is very much the
fashion at present to say that science is essentially "public.”
In fact, the name of science is often applied by definition only
to that which is publicly demonstrated and accepted. But what
does one find when he examines what he actually does? In
making this examination it will be sufficient to typify science
by logical reasoning, since logical reasoning is part of all scien-
tific activity. The value of logical reasoning lies in the assur-
ance of the correctness of the conclusion that one has when he
has properly gone through the logical processes. Now everyone
knows that the conviction of the correctness of a proof or an

FREEDOM

532

argument can be obtained only by oneself, after he has made
and understood the proper analysis. No one else can make me
see or understand, no matter what pressure he may exert on
me. I may say that I understand when I do not in order to
silence too vociferous an instructor, but a He that complies
against his will is of his own opinion still.” The feeling of
understanding is as private as the feeling of pain. The act of
understanding is at the heart of all scientific activity 5 without
it any ostensibly scientific activity is as mechanically sterile as
that of a high-school student substituting numbers into a for-
mula. For this reason, science, when I push the analysis back
as far as I can, must be private.

In spite of our stricture, it is evident enough that there is an
enormous public aspect to all scientific activity. I usually accept
what my qualified neighbor assures me is a scientific fact, and
I more often than not defer to my qualified neighbor’s scien-
tific judgment. Particularly do I defer to the consensus of the
scientific judgment of a large number of my fellows whose sci-
entific attainments I respect. There are at least two reasons for
this. In the first place I know that I am likely to make mis-
takes, so that a necessary part of any scientific activity of my
own in which I can feel confidence is to check what I have
done to see that I have not made a mistake. I often enough
do discover mistakes of my own, and I can also discover mis-
takes in what my fellows have done. Conversely, when my
fellow tells me that I have made a mistake I frequently find,
by checking again myself, that he is right. Particularly when
a number of my fellows independently say that I have made
a mistake I almost always find that they are right. It comes
then that I use the consensus of opinion of my fellows as a
method of checking against my own mistakes. In the second
place, my time is limited. I have time to think through for
myself only a limited number of conclusions, and particularly
I have time to collect and verify for myself only a limited
amount of scientific data. I therefore accept the statement of
my fellow with regard to an enormous number of scientific
facts and an enormous number of conclusions drawn by him
by logical processes. These results of my fellows are collected

P. W, BRIDGMAN

533

in libraries and classified, where I can get at them when I need
them. But I accept this work of my fellows only because it is
my potential experience 3 if I were not sure that if I repeated
my fellow’s observations and measurements and his logical
processes I would check his results, the record of his activity
would be of little interest to me. Hence I demand as a condi-
tion in any valid scientific publication that it be recorded in
such a form that I can repeat it and verify it. The spirit in
which I demand that the scientific activity of my fellows be
public is therefore paradoxically that in this way I insure that
what they have done may become my private possession, and
it is only in so far as it has the potentiality of becoming my
private possession that it is of interest to me. The essence of
science is private 3 science as a living thing is my science.

If I now step back a little for a comprehensive look at what
I have been doing in analyzing my activities, I see that there
are two levels at which I operate, the public and the private
levels. When I say “we,” and think of myself and my fellow
in the same terms, or use as meaningful such expressions as
“My fellow has feelings just like mine,” or think of objects
as eternally existing in their own right independent of any
observer, or when I talk about the body of scientific “truth”
as a thing that anyone may apprehend by the proper approach,
I am on the public level. But when I say, “It means nothing
to ask whether the feelings of my fellow are the same as mine,
for all I can know is what he says and does,” or when I ask
under almost certain danger of being accused of solipsism,
“What do I mean when I say that things exist eternally inde-
pendent of any act of observation?” or when I recognize that
“truth” without a vitalizing act of understanding by me is
dead, I am on the private level. The public level is tremen-
dously important, and most of our individual and social living
is done on this level. Our language is so constructed that we
are almost forced to talk on this level. As we have seen, before
the dawn of history the discovery of the public level consti-
tuted an invention, perhaps the most pregnant invention ever
made 3 by it we achieve an economy of intellectual effort with-
out which existence under present conditions might well be

FREEDOM

534

utterly impossible. But always beyond the public level, waiting
for a deeper analysis, is the private level. It is on the private
level that I realize my essential isolation 3 here is my awful
freedom that I can hardly face.

It looks to me as though most people manage to spend almost
all their lives exclusively on the public level. We begin life
not conscious of any level at all; we presently find ourselves
on the public level because of our whole scheme of education 5
and society does its best to keep us there for the rest of our
lives. If some method could be devised by which it could be
guaranteed that everyone would always live only on the public
level, a possible satisfactory existence might be insured. But
of course it is impossible by fiat or education to suppress a
vision that is waiting for anyone to see. Right here is, I believe,
the tap root of most of our difficulties j every one of us has the
potentiality, when pushed far enough, of discovering for him-
self the private level. This discovery is almost always the result
of some bitter experience. Curiously, one usually discovers his
own freedom, I think, by discovering that other people are
free from him. Someone else refuses to abide by a social con-
vention which I had always treated as binding, and I make the
disconcerting discovery that there is no way of compelling the
other fellow to accept the assumption back of the convention
and so to act of his own free will in accord with the conven-
tion. The converse consideration then reveals itself, namely,
that my fellows are powerless to compel me to accept their
mterests and purposes. If the conflict of interests is too great
and other conditions are right, a gangster is born. There is
something of the gangster in all of us, as we discovered during
prohibition. The gangster is vividly aware of the existence of
the private level 3 it seems to me that he thinks straighter than
many of the proper people who deplore his existence. Or one
discovers that there are things that cannot be said and ques-
tions that cannot be asked. A child who fears that he was
adopted, and who is also convinced that his ostensible parents
would feel justified in falsehood in order to keep the knowl-
edge from him, sees that he is estopped from asking them

P. W, BRIDGMAN 535

whether he is their own. The bitterness of realization of isola-
tion in such a situation may force a premature maturity.

The discovery of the existence of the private level thus
means at the same time a discovery of one’s own essential iso-
lation, and therefore of the impossibility of anyone else get-
ting a hold on one without one’s consent. But society does claim
to have a hold on one through all sorts of sanctions, and lan-
guage is constructed in this atmosphere. The almost inevitable
first reaction when one realizes the situation is for one to think
that people and society have been saying things that they
don’t do, that they don’t intend to do, and that they can’t
do. Hence arises a conflict with that very deep human need
for consistency between what we do and what we say. People
feel abused, disillusioned, and hurt when they discover that
things are different from what everyone is saying. It is the
perennially pathetic will to believe that a reconciliation between
what we do and what we say is now at last being accomplished
that makes possible the propaganda of dictators. The attempt
to adapt oneself to what one sees to be the actual situation
is a further embittering experience, and society does not thrive
on bitterness.

The most important and the ultimate problem of education
is to get people to see that there is a private level beyond the
public level, and to learn how to live with this realization, or
in other words, to learn to live with their freedom. The solu-
tion of the educational problem demands fundamental revi-
sions. Language, now adapted almost exclusively to the public
level, will have to be modified to permit expression of what
one sees on the private level. Deep-seated social instincts and
taboos will have to be recognized for what they are, and their
field of meaning and application delimited. For instance, one
of the very obstinate things to overcome will be the impulse to
carry over to the private level all the associations of the “self-
ishness” complex. So strongly are many people conditioned to
the necessity for unselfishness that their intellectual explora-
tion automatically stops when they sniff the faintest whiff of
the odor of selfishness. I cannot say to my conventional neigh-
bor, “On the private level everything must be self-centered,”

FREEDOM

536

without his retorting automatically, “But isn’t that terribly self-
ish?” and the discussion has closed before I can reply. But
every sophomore in his bull sessions knows and delights to say
this so obvious thing 5 it is only later when he begins selling
bonds that he realizes that this is one of the things that he
then cannot say. The education of the future will meet the
situation by making us conscious of the two levels of use of
language. On the public level selfishness refers to a reprehen-
sible code of conduct; on the private level it expresses a simple
fact, no more to be argued with than any other fact of observa-
tion. Probably in order to deal with this matter it will be neces-
sary to invent two different words, but there is far more to it
than anything so simple.

Future education will have to show the individual how to
live in the midst of his social isolation, but perhaps it will be
even more difficult to awaken a realization of all the implica-
tions of intellectual isolation and to devise a method of adapta-
tion. All the supernatural paraphernalia, which for many peo-
ple is all that makes life tolerable, will simply have to go.
There is no possibility of continuing to feel that one is in a
sympathetic world, which is evolving according to some pur-
pose with which one may feel oneself congenial, after one has
seen that it does not make sense to say of even his fellow
human being “He has feelings like mine.” It is not that the
world is really neither beneficent nor malign but instead neu-
tral 5 it is that it is meaningless to think of the world in terms
of beneficence. We are trying to apply an intellectual category
that is inapplicable; we are trying to do something with our
minds that cannot be done. Much of the machinery of thought
on the public level has to be ruthlessly discarded. On the level
on which one is asking, What do I mean when I say that ob-
jects exist? one has neither principles nor truths, for these are
inhabitants of the public level. But nearly everyone derives
intellectual support from a feeling of the existence of everlast-
ing principles in the background; it is hard to see that these
are my devices and to give them up and accept that it is im-
possible to do what I was trying to do when I invented them.
It is hard to admit that there are no certainties, and that even

P, W. BRIDGMAN

537

the probabilities with which I would fain replace them cannot
have the meaning I would desire. Intellectual activity is ulti-
mately as isolated as are my feelings, and all these things must
be done.

I stand alone in the universe with only the intellectual tools
I have with me. 1 often try to do things with these tools of
which they are incapable, and 1 have often been misinformed
and have delusions as to what they are capable of, but never-
theless it is my concern and mine only that I get an answer.
An individual trying to wrench himself free from the comfort-
able support of all the ages into an adequate realization of
what his freedom means will probably feel that the only vir-
tue applicable to the situation is fortitude. But fortitude is
necessary only as long as he stands on the traditional public
level. A generation properly educated from the beginning to
recognize the private level will not have to gird itself with
fortitude, for never having had the feeling of intellectual sup-
port, it will have to indulge in no heroics in giving it up,
but will be as objective with its freedom as the most correct
scientist is today in his limited field. The uncertainty and the
difficulty is in the transition. Will you and I be strong enough
and wise enough to get across?

Kurt Riezler

Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty of the
New School for Social Research

WHAT IS FREEDOM?

Dear Uncle:

I am in despair. I had to make a speech on “What is Free-
dom . 55 I got away with it by talking about the rights of men not
being property rights of absentee owners. That was easy, but I
must confess I do not know what freedom is. I went through
mountains of books and asked whomever I could. All reading
and questioning merely made the muddle in my brain worse. In
politics and economics everybody says something different:
government interference in business, unions, collusion, rackets,
monopolies, wage slavery. Manifestly each refers freedom to
just that sort of limitation from which he wishes to be free.
I looked into history. But history whirls around the great
names through ever changing sorts of servitude. I went to
science — it is worse. If causal determination rules nature and
man responds but to stimuli, there is no place for freedom. If
flowers are not free, why man? Can I go east or west? Do not
make fun of me. Answer my question. What is freedom? It is
a very serious matter.

Yours eagerly,

Joan.

Dear Joan:

It is indeed a very serious matter. The muddle in your brain
mirrors the muddle of our time. You throw a basketful of
questions at my unfortunate head. You expect a definition, but
there is no definition you would be willing to accept. You

KURT RIEZLER

539

know what freedom is in your heart, and you even know that
you know. Since you are pregnant with this knowledge you
ought to ask me as but a midwife to help you push your own
baby through your brain.

“Les grande s pensees vlennent du coeur” says Vauve-
nargues. Since freedom is such a “grande pensee,” we must look
for it at its source. It often happens, as in your case, that our
brains block our hearts. First, I must rid you of your precon-
ceptions.

Freedom has nothing to do with causal determination. I
doubt that you have anything precise in mind when your lips
utter the word “causality.” Let us assume it means that laws
govern the succession of happenings in time. Causal determina-
tion is a concept of physics. Here it has an accurate meaning.
Pm sorry, but I must use the language of the physicists. Physics
starts from a manifold extended in space-time and co-ordinates
physical properties to the points of this continuum. Both points
and properties are represented by numbers. The numbers de-
pend on one another in a specific way. If a closed system is
such that the numbers describing a three-dimensional cross
section at one time determine all the other numbers represent-
ing the system at any other time, physics speaks of causal deter-
mination. It is by no means the only possible sort of order. If
physicists, as they do nowadays, find that the phenomena in the
world of atoms and electrons do not fit into this particular
scheme, they speak of indeterminacy. Physicists are sound and
reliable people. Psychologists who apply the physical scheme
of reality to human behavior are less reliable. Physicists them-
selves do not like to go beyond their knowledge. They neither
say that causal determination means compulsion nor that inde-
terminacy means freedom. Compulsion and freedom presup-
pose beings in relation to which a movement or a change is free
or compelled. There are no such beings in the conceptual
scheme of physics. It is the lack of such beings that excludes
both compulsion and freedom from the physical aspect of real-
ity. Physicists are far from pretending that their conceptual
scheme is final and covers the whole of reality. It is a prelim-
inary aspect. A dehumanized science that dissolves man into

FREEDOM

540

a compound of physical events should speak of determinism
and indeterminism but neither of compulsion nor freedom. If,
however, you refute such a dissolving of man and cling to the
belief in such entities, you transgress the conceptual scheme of
physics. Then happenings, changes, movement, "causes” are
what they are in relation to this entity. Freedom and compul-
sion obviously depend on this relation. Such an entity may be
a being that can be compelled because it can be free, that can
be free because it can undergo compulsion. The physical as-
pect, whether it means causal determination or not, can never
decide for or against such an assumption.

Another of your questions seems to have grown out of the
same habit of your brain. Referring your actions to a vague
idea of determining "causes” your brain connects freedom with
deliberate choice. You may have the choice of going east or
west and yet your heart is far from feeling "free.” You may
have no choice and yet feel free.

Assume that a man has what you call the "free choice” to
turn to the left or to the right. This means there are no ex-
ternal conditions that force him to take one way or the other.
That is "freedom from.” I call this negative freedom. Let
me assume that man cannot make up his mind where to go.
He is labile. I would not say that he is free. He lacks in his
negative freedom what I should call positive freedom — and
that is the kind of freedom you wish to know about. Being
labile this man may be a slave. Every casual mood is his mas-
ter. Do not expect to find much freedom among the idle rich,
who have the choice of going to Hawaii or Egypt, are capable
of yielding to any desire, responding to any stimulus, pursued
by fashion, boredom, and curiosity. They follow and desert
every lead. If they teach you anything about freedom, they
only do so by means of what they lack.

There is another man. He knows what to do; he has no
choice; in his heart is necessity. And yet you may grant him
the positive freedom, which the other fellow lacks. The answer
he gives to conditions is his answer; it is his entire nature that
responds. Let us compare the two men. If you insist upon
speaking of “causes” without defining “cause” I would say:

KURT RIEZLER

541

the mere absence of a determining cause for the first man is
not freedom $ the mere presence of a necessity for the second
man is not servitude. Lability does not mean freedom, or such
necessity slavery. Not absence or presence of determining
causes but the relation of such so-called “causes” to that strange
entity called self decides between freedom and compulsion. The
lack of determining causes without such entities no more means
freedom than causality with the presence of such 'entities means
compulsion.

You could and should say not choice but deliberate choice.
Man, the only being capable of knowing what he does, can
deliberate about means and ends. That is his distinction. Thus
he is free. But look a little closer into our deliberate choices!
Are not most of them concerned with means 3 if with purposes,
the purposes too are means, not ends. Calculating means for
means, weighing chances and risks, amounts of pleasure and
utility — is this really to be called freedom? No. Freedom,
again, is not in our deliberated responses but in a certain rela-
tion between our responses, whether deliberated or not, and
the strange unity we call self. Let a response originate in the
whole of our being as a response of this whole to the whole
of the situation. This might have something to do with free-
dom. I do not wish, however, to follow this line further. Even
if by inquiring into this specific relation between our selves
and our actions we might be able to dress up a sort of “defini-
tion,” it would hardly help your heart to deliver its knowl-
edge. I dismiss causality and deliberate choice. Freedom is not
“freedom from” 5 even if this negative freedom were absolute —
containing no compulsion whatsoever — man would still not be
free; perhaps even no longer capable of being free. Freedom
must have a positive meaning, and it may turn out that only
in an activity that overcomes compulsion is your soul capable
of realizing this positive meaning. Freedom must be an end
in itself, something in your soul that you long for and cannot
express.

Let me begin again, and in another tune. What is nearest to
your young experience? When you ride out West, and the wind
strokes the waving fields and God’s sky, vaulted above, edges

FREEDOM

542

the blue line of the Rockies, in your joy and the joy of your
horse is something your heart calls freedom.

Lasst mich nur auf meinem Sattel gelten
Bleibt in Euren Huetten y Euren Zelten
Und ich reite froh in alle Feme
Ueber meiner Muetze nur die Sterne.

Lying on your back somewhere in the mountains you may envy
the eagle soaring over peaks and valleys. Are you not fond
of skiing? You race down a slope in Sun Valley, turning round
or jumping over every obstacle, provided you are master of
your skis, through the showering snow between silently glit-
tering trees — drinking in the white world with all your senses
and slaking your world thirst.

Such examples contain some limbs of the body of freedom.
I shall be cautious and say merely that they link somehow
the wide world to activities in which you feel the world to be
yours. Widening your soul, you own the world, and one and
the same horizon embraces your self and the world your soul
craves.

Such moments of elation are bound to be short. We never
own the world. If we enjoy elated moments we owe it to less
elated days — we enjoy them as finite beings that are limited on
all sides. I must bring down the silhouette of freedom from
the sky to the dark earth.

The peasant owns the soil of his father. In European moun-
tain valleys, apart from the highways of history, you can dis-
cover the signs of freedom in many a proud and weather-beaten
face, molded by labor and endurance. The man has his own
manner of politeness, he is even tolerant ; he may let you have
your own way but be quick to tell whoever intervenes to go
to hell. He depends on nature. An avalanche buries his barn,
a gale fells his trees, his grass dries up. Hardships precede
and succeed opportunities. Guard yourself against romanticiz-
ing. Limit his negative freedom, restrict his opportunities,
nevertheless you cannot help granting him a bit of positive
freedom that is more than freedom from something. His world
is small, but it is his. Inherited codes and habits are part of him.

KURT RIEZLER

543

He complies with nature and her laws. His freedom is a par-
ticular relation between himself and his world. It is, however,
not a state but a process — something to be acquired day by day,
not to be possessed and preserved. Look at his face — he owes
to the resistance he daily overcomes even the freedom he seems
to enjoy as a state of mind in moments of rest. Freedom is
never concrete except in the making.

I do not want you, however, to tie the concept of freedom
to the farmer economy. It resides in a particular relation be-
tween man, his activity, and his world. Since the tractors and
large enterprises deprived the Jeffersonian farmer of his oppor-
tunities, turning the average American from farming to sales-
manship or industrial labor, human freedom has been put to
a severe test, not because the farmer has gone but because the
greater part of mechanized labor destroys that particular rela-
tion between man, his work, and his world. Instead of looking
back to the farmer ideal we should try to restore that relation
under new conditions. Spare time, week ends, even a share in
the property will not do. Freedom must be inside, not outside,
our job. The human soul is flexible and ingenious. It can ani-
mate even machines. We must succeed in extorting from our
machine economy conditions in which work can be the worker’s
world as it is the peasant’s. That is what human freedom will
continue to demand.

You may wonder that I extended the example of the Euro-
pean peasant to that of the American pioneer who built up his
world in a wilderness. My reason is simple. You might inter-
pret the freedom of the American pioneer as freedom from
codes. The European peasant is tied to traditions and inherited
norms j if he is free it is by virtue of his relation to these tradi-
tions. His norms and habits, though inherited, are his own.
We must inquire into the interplay between freedom and
norms. There seems to be and yet not to be a contradiction.
Though norms limit our freedom, absence of norms would be
but license. That is a thorny problem demanding a cautious
approach.

We are born into our language 5 we learn it and yet it is our
own, part of ourselves. Its rules are our rules. As its slaves we

FREEDOM

544

are its masters. What is a language besides being means to all
sorts of ends that again may be means? Let me take speech
as speech and disregard purpose. Every language is the whole
of a world, a space in which our souls live and move. Each
word breathes the air of the whole. Each is open toward an
unbounded horizon. A language is not an aggregate of words
and rules. It is a potential world, an infinity of past and future
worlds, merely a frame within which we speak and can create
our world, actualizing ourselves and our language. I do not
pretend that we always do — good poets do it for us.

Thus we can say: The rules of our language are the basis
on which the kind of freedom we can enjoy in speaking becomes
possible. The first human being who endeavored to speak, creat-
ing the first word, was not more but less free than we. He had
not the marvel of a preformed world, the whole of an articu-
late spirit, pregnant with unborn worlds. It is on this basis
that we succeed in tinging an infinite horizon with the color
of the individualities of our egos, groups, peoples, nations,
and at the same time, in enlarging these always narrow indi-
vidualities to the whole of a cosmos. That is just what a free-
dom” means, applied to our speaking. We talk neither of free-
dom when the schoolboy disobeys grammar nor of servitude
when he submits to its rules. The boy would be right to com-
plain ‘of servitude if his teacher choked the living language
into a dead model of academic rules. The real rules, the inner
spirit of our language, enable our speaking to be free. They
are the soil in which the worlds we create grow and feed.
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, neither invented their languages
nor merely used a finished tool with greater skill. They molded
casual habits, contingent manners, into a unity that embraced
the breadth of the human cosmos, colored things, animated the
inanimate, seized the unseizable — they built a world, leaving a
heritage to their peoples, in loyalty to which their peoples par-
ticipate in their freedom.

Thus it is not by obeying rules that we are slaves, nor by
disregarding them that we are free. Not the rules as such but
our relation to them determines whether in obeying or disobey-
ing we are free or slaves. The peasant is free because the codes

KURT RIEZLER

545

of his fathers are his; he need not even consent to abide by
them. They are part of his nature. If his son revolts, the rules
become fetters. By breaking the fetters, however, his son gains
merely a negative freedom, freedom from these very fetters.
He will be free only by giving and following norms that are
both his and the norms of his world.

People who live by dead conventions look at the Bohemian
as freedom’s favorite son. The Bohemian is free from codes
he dislikes. The Bohemian himself, bored by petty clashes and
meticulous disorder, probably holds another view. Whenever
a Bohemian community is free, devotion to a cause has created
norms.

You are fond of music. Is not Mozart audible freedom,
freedom’s resounding joy in freedom? You feel it though it
refuses to be put into words. I do not attempt such a feat. I
only want you to consider that this perfect appearance of free-
dom presupposes the elaborate system of tonality as a realm
of norms, analogous to the marvel of a perfect language, and
like language a slow product of a long history. On this basis
Mozart’s freedom makes its appearance as the whole of a world.
Listening to this music you are “in” this world — all other
things fade away. This world, however, is your own being, is
life, actualized in a world of sounds. Of course you have a dis-
tinct feeling of Mozart’s individuality. You listen to a sonata;
it must be one of his. No one else could have composed it. And
yet this individuality is not Mozart the individual. It is not
merely the particular difference of this man from other men.
The individual has disappeared in the uniqueness of a world.
That is a strange and elusive thing. Mozart, like all artists,
actualizes much more than a limited self or even a merely
individual world. The world he creates is a world of many
others, of us all, not only the world of his time and his people.
You might almost say he got rid of himself, transcending the
narrowness a mere ego cannot help being.

Mozart seems to pour forth the song of freedom in effort-
less creativity and thus to elate your soul above this wrestling
world. But for heaven’s sake do not explain his freedom by
anything that you could call transcending man’s finiteness.

FREEDOM

546

Beethoven is not less free, though his music is burdened with
the grief of the finite creature. He goes the whole way from
chaos to order j he retains the creator’s pain and joy in the
created world. It is in shaking the soul to its roots that he stirs
to life its leaves and blossoms. He exults over our finiteness
in facing its brazen necessity. That, not escape, is freedom.

I return to the relation of freedom to norms. The rules, in
this case the articulate space of tonality, are only the funda-
ment. There is a kind of music, appropriate for exercises, that
seems to be content with mere allegiance to rules — similar to
passages of correct usage found in grammars as models of ap-
plied rules. Obviously mere obedience to rules is never free-
dom. Freedom is what you do with, and cannot do without,
these rules — is in an activity that lets these rules as yours be
the fundament of a world as a whole. That holds not only for
music, art, or language. It links freedom to culture or civiliza-
tion as its foundation. But any civilization whatsoever is such
a foundation only in so far as it grants such an activity.

In language, as in music, the acrobat who displays masterly
skill tempts you to call his skill freedom. But his freedom is
negative — freedom from insufficiencies that hamper others. Be-
yond that negative freedom he is the slave of his desire to
startle people by his cunning and his tricks, by playing boldly
on the border of what the rules allow. A small thing is lack-
ing, but the only one that matters: he pours no soul into his
artifices and shapes no world.

Let me jump to an example of another kind. We say: This
man has personality, or even, he is a a real person.” We say
it in a tone of praise, even of reverence. We know pretty well
what we mean, but seldom realize how queer a term we use.
No one means merely a charming appearance, intelligence,
poise, wealth, position, or even an aggregate of particularities
in which a man deviates from an average. A man can have one
or all of these qualities and yet not be a real person. We do
not think of greatness of ends, cleverness in means, of success
or failure. Success does not produce, failure does not prevent
a man from being, a personality, though it warps our judg-
ment. What then, you ask, can it be? This mystery, which I

KURT RIEZLER

547

by no means claim to unravel, is a tissue of many strands. In
any case it is safe to say: the man is somehow a whole. He be-
haves, speaks, acts, thinks, as a whole; he displays unity. This
“unity” is sometimes simple, never uniform, and always
unique. A personality is full of tensions and contrasts, but there
is a concord in its very discords, and tension means strength,
not weakness. This strange sort of unity unites discrepancies.
A field of force radiates a suggestive power which it takes some
effort to resist. We may say that this field of force embraces
all things with its specific kind of color, light, and air — under
a common horizon that has no boundaries.

One does not usually call a youngster a real person. If one
does, one means a “potential” person, anticipating a future.
Life and activity, resistance and endurance, are needed to
shape a personality. The face of a real person shows many a
scar. Failure, hardship, passion, effort, strengthen a unity to
master stimuli and command responses. This unique unity is
an ego and a world, the two as one. In giving to both the same
law a real person is actualized freedom.

These examples, however, fail to stress two things without
which freedom is not freedom, namely, tolerance and truth.
Tolerance seems to mean the political condition that everyone
can have his own way and opinion. That is not what I am
after. Though tolerant times may have some freedom because
of their tolerance, it is better to put it the other way: free
times are tolerant because they are free.

The term “world” emphasizes the totality, the infinite hori-
zon. It is a difficult term and easily misleads us into thinking
of the sky above or the unbounded space. But it means men,
not stars. Our world means the human beings among whom
we live. Our world is either in their souls or nowhere. With-
out them the sky is mute. We are something in and to our-
selves in being something in and to others. This “being to
others” is part of ourselves — a genuine and not an additional
part. Our life is giving and taking, the one in the other. In
such give and take our world grows; without it there is no
world, only environment. There is no such give and take
between the master and his slaves. If man “actualizes” him-

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self in others, the others must be free. Only one who is free
can return your freedom to you; slaves give back only their
servitude. There is a dignity in freedom that you can never
have without respecting it in others. Free times are sure of
their horizon. The world is wide, it embraces the ways of
others though they may differ from yours. The Bostonian
saints in their narrow world could not afford to be tolerant,
they were far from free. If you are free you can let your friend
have his way $ only then can he be a friend and open the win-
dow of your ego prison. I hope you feel what I mean though
it evades expression. Do not play with my words. Freedom is
not the only source of tolerance 5 there is indifference, lack of
a Whole and its commitments, laziness of heart. Most toler-
ance may be of that sort. That is not our concern.

And now as to truth. Here we enter a colder climate of
sharper winds. Do not dare to conclude from examples that
man “is” free. Let us start by confessing frankly that man is
not free. He is a finite being and walks a narrow path in haze
and sorrow. “God’s scourge drives to graze whatever creeps
on earth,” says Heraclitus. We live on other beings in need
and danger; we near our death exchanging one compulsion
for another. Face your finiteness and all it implies.

Man can lie, he can deceive himself as well as others. He
can mask a reality that he cannot endure. Most people do;
they move in a world of pretense. They elude themselves.
Their belief in freedom is merely a part of such elusion. They
shut their eyes to the most obvious reality. They are not free.
Freedom must brave truth.

I look for freedom in man’s relation to his world. Freedom,
I say, has to do with man building his own world. I do not
mean an arbitrary world, a world of lies and illusions, but this
world, the “real” world. The world we build and own, how-
ever, is never “this” world, never can be. There is always an-
other world behind and beyond our own world, a world that is
never ours. The world we build is only a world in the world.
Freedom therefore is concerned not only with our relation to
our own world but also, let me say, with the relation between
our own world and the “real” world. This relation ought to

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549

be of a particular sort. Our world has to represent the “real”
and not a sham world. But here again I must warn. you. Even
this will not do. The term “real” has a specific meaning which
probably is not yours. It is not the kind of reality with which
physics or chemistry is concerned. It means the realness in
human life. It is this reality that our world must represent,
not mask, if we are to be free. In this sense of “real” the world
of Shakespeare, though invented, is real. The world of chem-
istry, exact though it may be, is unreal. It has no relation to
human existence; it is no image. It is not even the world “in”
which the chemist as a human being lives. The reality I have in
mind, even the chemist will find in Shakespeare rather than
in his chemistry. That is the kind of truth with which freedom
is concerned. Who dares not face man’s finiteness should never
speak of freedom,

I am pretty sure that you will be disappointed. I have not
given you a definition of freedom. And a definition is what
you want. You will not find it. If there is freedom, it demands
that every girl must bear her children herself. Other people’s
definitions would mean no more to you than other people’s
children.

I casually picked up diverse examples, intended to span the
range of the problem, gathering the limbs of freedom. These
limbs form a body. Apart from the body they have no life.
One implies the other. An inner tie binds them into a unity.
That, however, is a long tale and cannot be told in a letter, if
at all. It would demand an answer to the question, What is
Man? This question contains an assertion and a question. Man
“is”; what is he? The assertion puts another question, a still
odder one, what this “is” is assumed to mean. Never fear; I
shall not write a letter that you would never read. Not only
will I withhold a definition; I shall even try to spoil the very
definition you are likely to hit upon. You may start by differ-
entiating negative from positive freedom. Since the former pre-
supposes the latter, you may say: Man is free if he can be what
he ought to be. This definition of a century ago connects nega-
tive and positive freedom. It does not sound so bad. But what
does “ought” mean? Obviously not any “duty” imposed by

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man upon man. There is an old answer: Man ought to “actual-
ize” his “self.” My examples even seemed to point to this
answer. But both these terms, “actualize” and “self,” died long
ago through loss of blood. They now have a hollow sound.

“Actualize” obviously means a kind of motion 5 motion links
a wherefrom to a whereto. The wherefrom means your poten-
tial self} the whereto the actuality of this potential self. Thus
we have two modes of “self” 3 “actualize” means the transition
from the one to the other. But what is this “self”? Why should
one’s narrow casual self be “actualized” and not rather perish
ere its pettiness be manifest?

The first self, the terminus a quo of that movement, seems
to mean the casual aggregate of diverse potential selves that
the accidents of your and your ancestors’ births may have
gathered in your heritage. What, then, is the second self? The
actuality either of all or of any accidental one of these casual
selves? Or just that one in which a man differs from other
people? The specific difference? But the differentia sfecifica
may be quite irrelevant. Or perhaps the opposite: the qualities
by which a human being levels off to the average? Obviously
neither the one nor the other. The self that has to be actualized
is not what we call the self. It is more than the self — in the
mode of a self. It is something for which a self stands — a po-
tential world. The self-actualization actualizes something in
which the particular self transcends itself and escapes its pet-
tiness.

There are still other dangers in the term. A hundred years
ago people sitting in armchairs cultivated their “gentle souls”
in musing upon ethical culture and called that self-actualizing.
The term suggests isolated individuals, each one actualizing
himself for himself. Beware of such suggestion. The world in
which alone we can actualize our “selves” is the world of others.
We have no actuality without being something to, in, and for
others. Do not think of the world as a prison, in which everyone
has to actualize himself for himself in his cell by enjoying in
safety the righteousness of a gentle soul.

There is a third danger. Actuality does not mean a state
which you can reach and preserve. In this queer kind of motion

KURT RIEZLER

55 *

that is the transition of something called a potential self to
something called an actual self the motion is its own terminus
ad quem. The transition is the end — doing is the work and
the work’s joy. That is the distinction of such doing. Actuality
means activity, but not any one of our activities means that
kind of actuality with which human freedom has to do. Here
the term self-actualization deserts you. Old Aristotle, its an-
cestor, insisted: “svepyeia epyov.” Instead of trying to decipher
such enigmatic language I advise you to turn to my examples:
the work keeps in store the doing, but in works alone is the
doing stored. Such works are the whole of a world 5 such doing
builds a world as a whole. If you are aware of such dangers,
go on using the term, but take care that it does not grow arid
in daily usage. Most such terms do.

As I near the end of this epistle, I appeal to your brain, in
giving you the reasons I had for preferring the appeal to your
heart.

Freedom for what? Such was the contemptuous response of
Lenin, the first of contemporary dictators, to allusions to free-
dom’s interests in Bolshevik demeanor. If you have no answer
to this question there is nothing from which man would be
entitled to be free. The dictator faced a world uncertain of an
answer.

Men’s answers differ and change. History, you say, whirls
around the great names. Sociologists and historians (not all, but
most of them, and especially those who emphasize their being
up-to-date) are eager to demonstrate that any answer is but
the answer of a social group, a country, a time. Suspect all evi-
dence gathered by these people 5 a loud voice and a smiling
superiority often mask incertitude.

Certainly, men’s answers change. What kinds of answers?
Definitions, religious or philosophical formulas in which man
thinks of the ends, purposes, goals, for which he wants to be
free. Man’s heart, however, is aware of a knowledge that does
not change though his brain may falter. But the distinction
between heart and brain will meet with sneers and laughter.
It will certainly not impress the smug partisans of relativity.

FREEDOM

55 ^

They demand more acute terms. I shall try to indicate for what
philosophical problem this distinction holds.

William James, analyzing the concept of “self,” differen-
tiates between the I and the Me, the knower and the known.
Let us follow the lead of this distinction and call the creator
of an image of himself “I” and the created image “Me.” The
I is not the Me. Man poses the question, What is Man?
Every age and culture give a different answer. Man, however,
as subject of the answer is no longer Man who asks the ques-
tion. The one is the Me, the other the I. While he is on the
way from the I to the Me, making an image of himself, some-
thing happens.

Man, I dare say, is a world-building animal. Man builds and
shapes his world. This activity is his freedom ; freedom is con-
cerned with his relation to his world. In building up his world
as a whole in which he lives, he denominates and defines and
determines things of both matter and mind. All his determin-
ing, or at least most of it, is done in what I call cosmological
terms, in terms belonging to, and dependent on, the patterns
of the worlds he builds in his religions, philosophies, sciences.
He defines Man 5 he determines his idea of himself, the Me,
by virtue of the conceptual scheme in which he orders the phe-
nomena in space and time, the totality of which he calls world.
As far as he proceeds in this way, his defining, denominating,
determining things, including the Me, risk getting entangled
in the historical process and becoming an easy prey to the so-
ciologists of knowledge and the relativistic historians.

That is what happens: The world intervenes between the I
and the Me. The Me depends upon our picture of the world.
These pictures change, none of these pictures is the world itself.
Thus the Me changes, Man’s image of himself, and his defini-
tion of freedom.

But man is not merely this Me. He is both the I and the
Me 5 he is the activity that leads from the I to the Me in fram-
ing a world and determining the Me by virtue of this frame.
As freedom has to do with this activity it must keep destroying
and remaking its own definition. And that is the reason I ap-
pealed to your heart: your heart knows not only about the Me

KURT RIEZLER 553

but also about this movement from the 1 to the Me and thus
about freedom.

I am treading the borders of dangerous questions. You may
conclude that, if I am right, something in our way of determin-
ing the Me must be wrong. Certainly there is. In determining
the Me we ought to retain, not dismiss, the I, the creator in the
creatum . That is what the American pragmatists try to do in
referring Truth and Reality to Man’s activity. The trouble is
that they go on to determine Man’s activity in terms of a
Me on the basis of the objective reality which they refute. This
is what they no longer can nor should do. But hereby hangs a
tale to which you would never listen, concerning the meaning
of “is,” called ontology. However, that is now merely the name
of a name.

The I, man as creator, goes on building, changing, rebuild-
ing, the image of the Me, as a creatum, among creata . If he did
not, his life would not be life. He builds his world and sta-
bilizes his building, in an endless tussle with a moving world
that never is and never will be the world. He stabilizes the
image of the Me. The image hardens, imbedded in institutions.
The creator depends on his creata . Freedom, however, cannot
be invested in any creatum as creatum . Being activity it resides
in the relation between creator and creatum . The dependency
of the creator on the creata ranges between two poles. It can
be mere compulsion: the creatum restricts and opposes the cre-
ator. Freedom can forge its own fetters. Thus it is bound to
break them, destroy its own work, devour its definitions — and
do so in freedom’s name. But the creatum can be the basis and
stage of further creativity, as in the case of a language. Then
the interplay between creator and creatum is but the breath-
ing of life. History goes both ways. Neither is the first dialec-
tical necessity, to which you have to submit, nor the second,
certitude on which you can rely.

As it is the crux of any definition of human freedom that
the definition of the Me must retain the I, so it is the crux of
freedom as institution that the work must keep alive the process
lest freedom bury itself under the ruins of its works.

As I reread your note I discover two questions not even *

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554

touched upon in my answer. The one concerns the freedom of
flowers, the other freedom’s interest in government interfer-
ence in business. Since the hour is late, this letter long, and
philosophy endless, do kindly permit me to cover both questions
in one and the same argument.

Nature is one. Let us assume that flowers “live.” As they
wither in your hands so life eludes the biochemist who cannot
help dissecting in observing. It may be that the secret of life
in a flower has something to do with that interplay between
creator and creatum — philosophers say natura mturans and
natum naturata — in which your own life breathes, grows, blos-
soms, and fades. If you dare to make such an assumption, you
may, out of reverence for such a secret, call flowers free.
Flowers, however, are blind and live in darkness. Call them
unfree if you want to reserve the great name for Man, because
in Man alone nature is conscious of herself — or at least could
or should be.

Your father and brother quarrel about freedom’s interest
in government interference in business or business interference
in government. Let us be fair and assume that they are not
blind and are not merely reacting like flowers to dumb impulses
or pressures. Let them share a hidden awareness about free-
dom and disagree as to the way. Is not their quarreling just
a tiny bit of that same interplay between creator and creatum?
Human beings, participating in the organic life of a not yet
mechanized nation, in quest of an ever uncertain way, move
in a moving world, wrestle to fit the creata of yesterday into
the creanda of tomorrow, cling to the one and anticipate the
others.

Grant them their quarreling and rely on your heart. All
hearts throughout the world and its history beat the answer
to the question, Feedom for what? though most ears are either
incapable of, or prevented from, hearing the heart beat.

Yours affectionately,

K

Max Wertheimer

Professor of Psychology and Philosophy in the Graduate
Faculty of the New School for Social Research

A STORY OF THREE DAYS

I SHALL report what happened in the course of three days
to a good man who, facing the world situation, longed for
a clarification of the fundamentals of freedom.

He saw: ideological devaluation of freedom had spread ;
freedom in the humane meaning of the word was proclaimed
false, outworn, useless; and the radiance of the old idea was
often exploited for other ends. Some men seemed to have lost
sight of it entirely, without realizing what they had lost. Con-
fused by the complexity of actual situations many became
uncertain, basically unclear with regard to the very concept
of freedom, its meaning, value, actuality. Even men who loved
freedom deeply often felt helpless in the face of actual argu-
ments. So it was with our man; not that he felt uncertain in
many or most of the concrete issues; but he felt impelled to
reach a fundamental clarification. What at bottom is freedom?
What does it require? Why is it so dear to me? He was a
humble empiric, open-minded, thirsting for information.

Of course, those three days of his search were only a begin-
ning for him. He touched only some of the issues involved,
for it was by chance that he met just those men and read just
those books. They represented only certain points of view and
the discussions were by no means exhaustive, yet I think that
what he experienced was in many respects characteristic, typical
of some fundamental trends in actual thought.

Those were dramatic days for him, in which he became more

555

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556

and more bewildered, but at the end of those three days he
felt that he had gained some clarification, that he now saw more
clearly something that only his heart had told him before.

He sought out a sociologist who was immersed in studies
of this very problem and he asked his question. The sociologist
was very kind. He told him about the investigations of modern
sociology, about the history of societies, how ideas of freedom
had developed in them and what freedom had meant to them 3
he told him how different were the ideas of freedom and the
ways of realizing them, etc. Our man was fascinated by the
richness of what he heard. He felt that here were men with
an honest, sincere approach 3 these were serious studies, and
he became more and more hopeful. “You are the right man,”
he said. “I am sure you feel as I do in the actual world situa-
tion,” and he told him how he felt.

“I share your feelings,” said the sociologist. “I too hold
proudly and passionately to our traditional values.”

“But why?” he was asked. “What is it that makes freedom
so dear to you also, and what is freedom essentially?”

“I am at one with the traditions of our people,” said the
sociologist. “But if you ask me about the fundamentals, I must
answer: It became more and more clear in our studies that the
standards, the evaluations, the goals, that an individual has are
shaped, determined, by the social group, the society of which
he is a part. Different periods in history, different societies, dif-
ferent nations, have different views. Ethical standards are rel-
ative.”

There was a long pause. After a time our man asked in a
low tone: “Is that all? Should what these others assert be true?
Are our ideas of freedom merely the historical standards of a
certain time, now perhaps outworn? Are there no fundamental
standards 3 are the requirements of freedom a fairy tale?”

“No fairy tale,” said the sociologist, “but developed in and
characteristic for certain historical, cultural, and social settings.”

“And nothing more?” asked our man. “Is no decision pos-
sible among various systems? Are there no features that are

MAX WERTHEIMER

557

basic in men with regard to questions of freedom, no require-
ments for men, as men should be? No features that are desir-
able, required in human society?”

“Here you are touching upon very difficult things,” said the
sociologist. “Some of my friends would say that the fight for
freedom was always a fight against certain concrete restraints
or compulsions and meant, necessarily, different things in dif-
ferent times. Society in its rules and institutions necessarily
limits freedom, imposes restraints that with time change in
different directions. There are no axioms which would allow
us to speak of fundamental standards. To speak of ‘the man 3
or ‘the society 5 is only a pale abstraction.”

Our man became more and more bewildered. “Was this, 55
he said, “what your friends wrote and taught? And was this
not one of the factors in the developments we now face, one
of the factors that paved the way for political leaders pro-
claiming new and other national or racial ethics, willfully and
efficiently?”

“Bo not overestimate the role of the opinions of sociolo-
gists, 35 said the sociologist quietly. “I told you that this is the
position that most of my friends take. And certainly they were
sincerely driven to these conclusions by their findings, which
contain great factors in their favor. We cannot lightly dis-
miss them. I myself would not dismiss your questions with
their answer. I feel that these are genuine questions 5 that as
sociologists we must face not only diversities in various cultures
but also must seek for fundamentals, for identities in the re-
quirements of man and in the dynamics of society — in a doctrine
of man and in a doctrine of society. There have been approaches
in this direction. I feel as you do that in this context the prob-
lem of freedom will play a genuine role. But these are scientific
utopias, my friend 5 we are far from any real insight, far from
even a real method of approach. There are some young soci-
ologists who are groping in this direction and grappling with
the problem.

“But if you ask for a definition of freedom, not in terms of
the full reality of a specific society, which, of course, I should

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558

prefer to give you, then my answer would have to be: absence
of restraints, of compulsions, of external hindrances from doing
what one desires to do, and maybe I should add absence of
imposed internal inhibitions. . . . Though I might say that
such a definition certainly lacks concreteness.”

Our man thanked the sociologist. He felt sad, puzzled, bewil-
dered. He came home, sat down, and reached for one of the
books he had ordered for his search. It was a novel by a famous
writer of 1936. He was too disturbed to read thoroughly. A
certain page caught his eye. He read, more and more excitedly,
these sentences:

Anthony . . . turned over the pages of his latest notebook ... he
began to read.

“Acton wanted to write the History of Man in terms of a History
of the Idea of Freedom. But you cannot write a History of the Idea
of Freedom without at the same time writing a History of the Fact
of Slavery. . . .

“Or rather of Slaveries. For, in his successive attempts to realize
the Idea of Freedom, man is constantly changing one form of slavery
for another. . . .

“Abolish slavery to nature. Another form of slavery instantly
arises. Slavery to institutions. . . .

“All modern history is a History of the Idea of Freedom from
Institutions. It is also the History of the Fact of Slavery to Insti-
tutions. . . .

“Institutions are changed in an attempt to realize the Idea of
Freedom. To appreciate the fact of the new slavery takes a certain
time. . . .

“The honeymoon may last for as much as twenty or thirty years.
Then ... it is perceived . . . that the new institutions are just as
enslaving as the old. What is to be done? Change the new institu-
tions for yet newer ones. ... And so on — indefinitely, no doubt.

“In any given society the fact of freedom exists only for a very
small number of individuals. ... For them, institutions exist as a
kind of solid framework on which they can perform whatever gym-
nastics they please. . . .”

Anthony shut his book, feeling that he couldn’t read even one line
more. Not that his words seemed any less true now than they had
when he wrote them. In their own way and on their particular level
they were true. Why then did it all seem utterly false and wrong?

MAX WERTHEIMER

559

“Utterly false and wrong/ 5 our man said passionately. How
was it possible at all, he asked himself, for a man to formulate
such assertions! What he had read seemed unbelievable. At the
same time he felt strangely reminded of remarks he had en-
countered in the last years on one or another occasion, for which
these unbelievable formulations seemed somehow fundamental.
Now his longing for clarification changed into a passionate
drive. I must, I must see through all this. Somehow it is a
strange distortion — to view the facts in this way seems to press
them into a blind and wrong direction. What is it that is wrong
in the fundamentals of this picture?

He took up the next book. It was a book from the year 1928
by a famous psychoanalyst and dealt with culture. He read it
through from beginning to end. Again and again he turned
back to some basic formulations in it. There were some remarks
of another character added here and there, but in the main
those formulations seemed to him nakedly to express basic as-
sumptions which led straight to those bewildering passages he
had encountered in the novel.

. . . every culture must be built up on coercion and instinctual re-
nunciation. . . .

abandoning coercion and [abandoning] the suppression of the in-
stincts . . . would be the golden age, but it is questionable if such
a state of affairs can ever be realized. . . . the psychical sphere of
culture . . . frustration . . . prohibition . . . privation . . . the
instinctual wishes that suffer under them are born anew with every
child.

. . . Such instinctual wishes are those of incest, of cannibalism,
and of murder.

... It is in accordance with the course of our development that
external compulsion is gradually internalized.

. . . Every child presents to us the model of this transformation;
it is only by that means that it becomes a moral and social being.

. . . Those people in whom it [the internalization of external
compulsion] has taken place, from being foes of culture, become its
supporters.

. . . [but] a majority of men obey the cultural prohibitions in
question only under the pressure of external force, in fact only where
the latter can assert itself and for as long as it is an object of fear.
This also holds good for those so-called moral cultural demands.

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560

. . . We have spoken of the hostility to culture, produced by the
pressure it exercises and the instinctual renunciations that it de-
mands. If one imagined its prohibitions removed, then one could
choose any woman who took one’s fancy as one’s sexual object, one
could kill without hesitation one’s rival or whoever interfered with
one in any other way, and one could seize what one wanted of an-
other man’s goods without asking his leave: how splendid, what a
succession of delights life would be !

. . • [but] only one single person can be made unrestrictedly
happy by abolishing thus the restrictions of culture, and that is a
tyrant or dictator who has monopolized all the means of power. . . .

“Could, this be true?” our man exclaimed. “Is this Man?
Society? Freedom? Is freedom lack of restraint of ‘instinctual
impulsions/ external or internal? Is Man essentially so deter-
mined, impelled by fear of punishment or by habits, by internal-
ized rules imposed on him by compulsion?”

“I must see a philosopher!”

He went next day to see a philosopher and asked, “Will you
tell me please what freedom is, philosophically?”

The philosopher smiled. “This,” he said, “is an old and
famous topic of philosophy down through the centuries. If you
like, I can give you the names of a great number of books which
you can study — are you interested in the history of philosophy?
There are a number of philosophers who still deal with these
questions, but if you like, I can try to tell you briefly how the
problem lies in modern philosophy as I see it, and, I may say,
as it has been well established in modern philosophy.

“The concept of freedom, of free will, of free choice, played
an important role in various religions and in various philos-
ophies. It was wish-thinking. Modern developments in science
and philosophy have shown that there are no free acts. Causality
governs them or, as we formulate it, all actions take place under
the principle of determination, are determined by their causes;
there is no such thing as an action leaping into existence un-
caused, and so what is going to happen, happens by necessity.
It is mere blindness if men believe that they are free to act or

MAX WERTHEIMER 56 I

to make decisions without realizing that their actions are the
necessary outcome of forces which determine their choice.

“You might look into the modern textbooks of psychology.
In most of them you will not even find mentioned such terms
as free will, free decision, etc.

“There have been discussions about this principle of deter-
minism. Some tried to save the old, outworn ideas by trying to
defend a kind of psychological indeterminism. But there are
few who would still hold these views to be defensible. There
are some philosophers nowadays who believe that the newest
developments in physics, viz., the uncertainty principle and
statistics of probability, are again giving a foothold to indeter-
minism. But one should not misunderstand the meaning and
role of these concepts in modern physics: they may make for
some uncertainty or chance happenings but they give no basis
for the existence of free will . 57

Our man lapsed into deep thought. “I think,” he said, “I
realize that important consequences are involved in this philo-
sophical discovery of determinism. In looking, for example, at
a man who has committed a crime, we should not forget to look
for the causes which made him commit it. And we may find
that his deed was due to factors which were beyond his control.
We must try to understand his deed from the factors of causal
necessity.”

“Yes,” answered the philosopher, “but don’t forget that it is
not only in cases in which you may discover an external force
that compelled him, but also in cases in which it would have
been said in olden times that he acted of his own free will, on
his own decision, with nothing external to compel him. Such
a description is utterly superficial. A man is determined even in
these cases by the set of causal forces within him, by his desires,
instincts, acquired habits.”

“Is there not this important factor,” asked our man humbly,
“that man, after all, in a situation which calls for decision does
not know of the forces that will determine him and, therefore,
practically will have to choose, to decide? That everything is
in fact determined may be of value to someone looking into the
past, after the decision has been made, after the deed is done,

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562

but not before? And so the principle of determinism does not
perhaps do away with the questions of free decision.”

“There are some,” said the philosopher, “who try to make
use of this factor of past and future for our problem, again in
connection with new developments in modern physics. But
don’t you see, this does not help — indeed this may be the very
reason why man is deceived about himself, why he may appear
to himself as free, which is nothing other than that he does not
know how in his seemingly free decisions he is lawfully and by
necessity determined by causes.”

Our man felt uneasy about this answer, but, unable to clarify
the issue, he proceeded with another question. “Aren’t those
ideas of determinism somewhat dangerous?” he asked. “I
should guess that a man who really comes to believe in deter-
minism and to act sincerely in accordance with this belief would
not only change his philosophical opinions, but his very actions.
He would become a fatalist, relieved of all troubles in facing
a situation that calls for a decision ... it will happen any-
how. . .

“True,” said the philosopher with a sly twinkle. “But fortu-
nately men believe in their will, and even if they are philo-
sophically convinced of determinism, they will not make use of
it in actual situations. On the other hand, you may see in your
remark a profound confirmation of the very principle of deter-
minism: even your belief or disbelief in the principle may be a
determining factor.”

Suddenly our man jumped up from his chair. “Now,” he said
excitedly, “permit me another question. If we state that all is
determined, does this change anything in regard to the real
problems of freedom (with the only possible exception of this
problem of the realization of fatalism) ? Suppose we attach to
every deed, to every action, to every attitude, the quality, Tt
is determined,’ would not all real concrete problems of free-
dom remain just the same? The discussions between deter-
minism and indeterminism do not touch the real problem, in
fact they obscure it. Should the essence of free action be that
it is in no way determined? Or if all actions are determined,
that there are no free men?”

MAX WERTHEIMER

563

“Let us not mix up such practical problems with the philo-
sophical issue/ 7 said the philosopher. Here from the fullness
of his heart our man told the philosopher about his troubles,
facing the world situation, about his meeting with the sociolo-
gist and about the formulas in the books he had read.

Said the philosopher, “Like you I am a lover of political
freedom. Certainly there is the very important problem of how
much the State should or should not restrain the freedom of
individuals. These are questions with which the sociologists and
men of political science may properly deal 5 but don 7 t you see
that the very foundation of all that you have told me about
the sociologist and the formulations in the books is the modern
discovery of determinism, of realizing it as basic in all these
questions? 77

Our man realized this and was more bewildered than before.

The next day he said to himself, This is what I have learned:

1. There is no freedom because all is determined, is the con-
sequence of causes. Or,

2. Freedom is absence of external restraints, of compulsion,
freedom to pursue whatever wish may come to one’s mind,

Or, because such wishes may be due to whatever standards
may have been internalized on the basis of compulsion.

3. Freedom means to be able to follow those instinctual im-
pulsions without inhibitions.

Suddenly all he had heard in this context seemed to him
utterly strange, narrow, inadequate 5 superficial, oversimplified,
wrongly directed, blind to all the real problems of freedom,
appropriate neither to the nature of man nor society, out of focus
on both. He felt the desire to get away from all these terms
and definitions, he wanted to face again the real situation, to
restate the problem in full view of life.

He first thought of what the sociologist had told him and
soon felt lost in the manifold features of history, its complexi-
ties, its diversities.

“First let me realize, 77 he said passionately, “what I have
seen with my own eyes. Have I not seen in my experience

FREEDOM

564

strong and indeed very characteristic cases of men, of children,
who were free, who were unfree? What were the essentials?
My experiences, of course, are no sufficient basis for statistical
generalizations; nor do I wish to make any now. What I want
is to grasp, to realize, what I have seen.”

He recalled a number of cases. Then he said, “Sometimes
one sees a man, and by the way he goes through life, by his
attitudes, by his behavior in dealing with life situations one
feels: this is a free man, he lives in an atmosphere of freedom.
And so in observing children.

“On the other hand, one sees men or children, and feels
strongly: in their behavior there is no freedom — there is no air
of freedom in their world.”

It is, he thought, not easy to put into words what one faces
so vividly in these extreme cases. Let me think — what were
these cases concretely?

The free man, he recalled, frank, open-minded, sincerely
going ahead, facing the situation freely, looking for the right
thing to do and so finding where to go.

The opposite — he first thought of children he had often seen
— inhibited, pushed, or driven, acting by command or intimida-
tion, one-track minded, chained to certain ways of acting and of
thinking, even in viewing situations — the veiy curves of their
actions, of their movements, often showed these features, espe-
cially in meeting new situations. They often looked like sorry
products of external influences or like slaves of any desire that
might have come to their minds. Often they looked like robots,
somehow crippled, robbed of essential abilities, narrow-minded,
stiff, rigid, mechanical, their movements and postures often had
the effect of puppets on strings. And grownups still more so.
(Even slave drivers — he had seen such in our times — were they
free? No, they belonged here.) Of course, many thus enslaved
did not overtly behave timidly at all— just the opposite, brutal
and overproud. But one sensed the same unfreedom, sometimes
one saw what happened when they had to face a new situation
in which their coat of armor was futile. . . .

And what experiences he had had in observing transitions!

If a child, if a man, having lived as that kind of slave, came

MAX WERTHEIMER

565

to live in another social field in which there was the real air of
freedom, what marvelous happenings had he not observed in
such cases! Very similar indeed to regaining health after a long
illness.

Suddenly the whole problem appeared to him to be no longer
a problem of philosophical schools of whatever standards or
evaluations, but a problem of hygiene — it seemed to require
the biologist studying health conditions. This is a task of scien-
tific investigation, he thought. But not in terms of those previ-
ous theses. What conditions, what institutions, make for the
free? What for the unfree? And what price is paid in the
change?

This, it was now clear to him, was not to be viewed piece-
meal, in terms of a choice, of a wish, of an “instinctual impul-
sion,” etc. One’s whole attitude towards the world, towards the
other fellow, towards one’s group, towards one’s own momen-
tary wishes was involved. And suddenly those theses dealing
only negatively with freedom appeared to him like saying that
growth, that maturing, is absence of impediments to growth ;
that beauty is absence of ugliness; that good thinking is ab-
sence of mistakes; that genuine achievement is due to absence
of inhibitions; that kindliness, or friendship, is nothing but ab-
sence of hostility; that justice is any legal rule imposed arbi-
trarily. “What we face,” he said, “is not a problem to be dealt
with in such a piecemeal, negative way.”

After a while he found himself thinking of his experiences in
certain specific situations in which there was clearly the one or
the other kind of behavior. He recalled discussions. What dif-
ferences! In the way a man faces a counterargument, faces new
facts! There are men who face them freely, open-mindedly,
frankly, dealing honestly with them, taking them duly into
account. Others are not able to do so at all: they somehow
remain blind, rigid; they stick to their axioms, unable to face
the arguments, the facts ; or, if they do, it is to avoid or to get
rid of them by some means — they are incapable of looking
them squarely in the face. They cannot deal with them as free
men; they are narrowed and enslaved by their position.

For a moment he himself objected, Why are you connecting

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566

the issues of freedom with all these features? With questions
of being blind or narrow-minded in contrast to facing situations
with open eyes and dealing with them honestly? Yes, he de-
cided, I must; these things are most closely and intimately cor-
related with the meaning and the facts of freedom.

How was it in history, in the times when people honestly
fought for freedom? Those men fought against the arbitrary,
willful acts of their governments, they fought for fair and
honest dealing. To those men freedom was envisaged and en-
deared in these terms. Freedom was sought and longed for not
in terms of being able to do whatever might come to one’s
mind, to act in as one-sided and as blind a way as one might
wish, to be free to brutalize the other fellow willfully. Were
not those praisers and lovers of freedom those very men who
demanded enlightenment for everyone, who fought for just
dealing in courts, and just laws?

Thinking of the three theses he had written down earlier, he
felt as if the scales had fallen from his eyes. The real question
was, what kind of attitude, what rules, what institutions make
for the free, what for the unfree? The real problem is not as
in thesis (i), which seemed to say that all determination, all
causes and influences, are factors against freedom; the problem
is which ones are? This is a matter of causes and consequences;
some make for freedom in men, some for unfreedom!

“What nonsense!” he said. “If a man is blind, or sees things
in a distorted way and you open his eyes, give him knowledge,
make him see, you may thereby strongly influence him, change
him, determine him, but are you thereby limiting his freedom?

“And do not men have a healthy desire not to be blind or
blinded, at least in the long run? Are there not, thank God,
some tendencies of this kind in men? And in the dynamics of
society?”

Thinking of theses (2) and (3), he said to himself, There is
something in formulating freedom as absence of restraint, of
compulsion; a price is paid when spontaneity, genuineness, are
impaired or destroyed. Yet the very term compulsion means
willful, arbitrary force. And spontaneity, genuineness, are cer-

MAX WERTHEIMER

567

tainly not adequately viewed in terms of “whatever wish may
come to one’s mind / 5 or in those “instinctual impulsions . 55 What
he had read about happiness was not happiness , was a crude
caricature of happiness.

The assertions that “cultural institutions by necessity restrain,
limit, freedom 55 now appeared to him astoundingly superficial.
Is limiting freedom the essence of institutions for true educa-
tion? of the roads that society constructs? Likewise of the de-
velopment of law and of courts — if understood not in terms of
any arbitrarily imposed law, but of making possible some de-
gree of confidence in fair, just dealing? Is it not sheer piecemeal
thinking to say “restraint is restraint / 5 if a kidnapper restrains,
imprisons, a child in order to extort ransom, and if another
restrains the gangster from doing it in order to help the child?
Is there not in the very birth of cruelty, of brutality, the factor
of being blind, of being narrowed down?

And are there not tendencies in men and in children to be
kind, to deal sincerely, justly with the other fellow? Are these
nothing but “internalized rules on the basis of compulsion and
of fear 55 ? He thought of children whom he had seen grow —
how little did this blind sweeping generalization apply to their
kindness, to their desire for real grasp, to their horror in the
face of an act of brute injustice.

“What is needed / 5 he said, “is a sincere study of the tend-
encies, the vectors, their development in children, in men, in
the dynamics of society, but not in terms of such rash defini-
tions, or of those ‘instinctual impulsions/ assumed in blind gen-
eralization. These are tasks for empirical study in the same way
that problems of philosophy have become problems of modern
science. Old theses, dependent on the philosophical school to
which one adhered, should now be studied, discussed in scien-
tific investigations. To be sure, superficial statistics will not
help; these are deeper questions, involving the dynamics of
men, of society. And if these fine tendencies are often weak, if
their awakening, their growth, are often endangered, or if they
are wholly overcome by other forces, does this justify construct-
ing substitutes on the basis of their very opposites, or overlook-

FREEDOM

568

ing them, denying them entirely? There was some positive de-
velopment in this direction. It needs help.”

Marvelous tasks for investigations! he thought.

Then again he found himself thinking of the actual world-
situation. In full view of it, of the actual happenings, he reread
the three theses he had written that morning. The whole line
of approach appeared to him cruelly to miss the issue by focus-
ing on “whatever wish may come to one’s mind,” and on those
“instinctual impulsions.” Was this the issue? (Probably it is
just blind restraint that breeds and feeds such impulsions.)

Here are the basic issues, he felt, instead of in those three
theses:

That human beings are exposed to injustice, to willfulness, to
brutality; robbed of any hope of being treated with fairness,
with kindness 5 that institutions are destroyed which had slowly
developed, guaranteeing some justice, some fair dealing.

That men are forced to keep silent in the face of acts of in-
justice, with no possibility of helping the victims; forced even
to help in performing those acts against their will and better
knowledge.

Still more, that men, even children, by willfully distorted
information become narrowed down, poisoned in their very
souls, robbed of the preconditions of free judgment through
being blinded, robbed of what in man and society is humane.

Now he felt more clearly why freedom was so dear to his
heart.

What he had reached, he felt, was only a start. He saw that
there are other problems to be faced; problems of the physical,
economic constraints of men by hunger, dire lack of means of
subsistence; problems of real co-operation (oh, what he had
gone through were not problems of piecemeal individualism) ;
problems of mutual justice between groups; problems of the
individual called as a member of his group not only to co-
operate in performing, but in facing and judging the very
goals; etc. But in all these as in other urgent problems what
he had gained did not seem useless. The task he felt was to
face these problems also with the attitude of the free man, pro-

MAX WERTHEIMER 569

ductively, sincerely 5 real help he felt would come only this
way.

He was eagerly looking forward to the further steps.

Then he took his notebook and wrote down after the three
theses:

“Logical remark. This is what I have gone through, logi-
cally: In these three theses freedom is viewed in a piecemeal
way and defined as a thing in itself, cut off from its living role
and function, basically merely negative. Freedom is (1) a con-
dition in the social field, and a terribly important one. In view-
ing such a condition we should not view it as a thing in itself
and so define it, but we should view it in its role, in its func-
tion, in its interactions, in its consequences for men and for
society. Freedom is logically (2) not just a condition; what
matters is how men are and how they develop, how society is
and how it develops. Freedom is a Gestalt quality of attitude
of behavior, of a man’s thinking, of his actions. (Think of the
difference between the free and the unfree, the description of
which was of course only a first approach to viewing the essen-
tials.) Now logically freedom as condition (1) and freedom as
Gestalt quality (2) must be viewed not as two pieces, but in
their intimate interrelation. Freedom as condition is only one
factor, but a very important one with regard to freedom as
character quality. To put a man (or even a dog) in chains has
consequences. Some men to be sure remain free in their hearts,
even in chains, waiting for the moment to throw them off. But
there are men whom chains enslave to the core. And here in
the interaction between freedom as condition and freedom as
character quality, one understands the real meaning of brute
restraint and compulsion — the consequences for the victim and
for the oppressor.”

What matters is not a rash and elegant definition, but really
facing the issues.

Wm. Pepperell Montague

Professor of Philosofhy in Barnard College , Columbia University

FREEDOM AND NOMINALISM

I N the main position of this paper I shall briefly explain and
defend two propositions:

I. That because the abstract natures or essences of things
and their relations to one another can be with complete effec-
tiveness represented or mapped in terms of linguistic symbols,
there has arisen the "illusion of nominalism,” which is the
belief that the symbols or names do themselves constitute a
logically autonomous and self-sufficient system, and that in the
syntactical structure of that system resides the logical reality
that has formerly been supposed to subsist in the extralinguistic
entities symbolized by the system.

II. That because of the power of the individual to select
freely from the configurations of abstract forms anyone that
interests or pleases him and to construct for it a symbolic map,
there has again arisen the illusion of nominalism, which in this
context is the belief that a freedom to select from what is there
is a freedom to create what was not there, with the implication
that what appears to be abstract and objective is merely sym-
bolic and subjective and its supposed laws merely rules of pro-
cedure determined arbitrarily like the rules of any game, by
those who invent it and play it.

I. CONCERNING THE FIRST PROPOSITION

To a logic-loving mind it is a fascinating task to take a body
of abstract doctrine that has grown from the soil of creative

WM. PEPPERELL MONTAGUE 571

imagination, rank, luxurious, and untrained, and subject it to a
systematic reformulation expressed in a minimum number of
indefinable (or only denotatively definable) terms and of un-
demonstrable propositions or postulates from which can be de-
duced in succession an assemblage of interrelated theorems ade-
quate to cover the whole subject matter. And when such a logi-
cal map of symbols has been made there is a psychological
temptation for its makers, and still more for those who accept
it humbly as their guide, to mistake the symbols for what they
symbolize. As an illustration of this temptation I am minded to
take that one of Professor Whitehead’s many delightful stories
in which an American tourist rushes up the steps of the British
Museum and in breathless excitement asks of the doorman if
the Elgin marbles are still there. On getting a prompt and sym-
pathetic reassurance, he turns away with obvious relief and
starts down the steps marking something in a book as he de-
parts. Thereupon the doorman exclaims in surprise: “But, Sir,
aren’t you coming in to see the marbles?” “No, no, thank you,”
replies the tourist, continuing his retreat, “I’ll just check them
off in my Baedeker.” Now it may be that some of us feel a
sneaking sympathy for the poor devil who, goaded by his own
or his family’s New England conscience, has resolved to “do”
all the chief sights of old England in his month’s vacation. But
even so, we can hardly approve his illusion that checking them
off in the guidebook is the same as observing them in the flesh.

There is, however, a very plausible reason for the nominal-
istic illusion that a good map is itself the reality and the only
reality of that which it is supposed to map. When properly
made, it constitutes an effective translation of the reality into
operational terms, which are not only practically effective but
empirically observable, and not only empirically observable
but susceptible of symbolic manipulations with a methodological
refinement and precision which no objective existence could pos-
sibly provide.

Let me illustrate the seeming strength and the actual weak-
ness of the nominalistic procedure by another anecdote, but one
that is sad rather than comical and derived from my own expe-
rience rather than from that of someone else. Impressed by the
majesty of Principia Mathematica, and by the prestige attach-

FREEDOM

57 ^

ing to the increasing practice of devising symbolic equivalents
for the supposedly subsistential reality of objective forms and
their relations, I determined some fifteen years ago to try this
enterprise myself. Beginning in a very small way, I took the
equation 7 + 5=12 which was one of Kant’s examples of a
valid a priori synthetic proposition and strove to reduce it to a
sequence of analytic propositions. Let us regard the number
one ( 1 ) and the symmetrical relation or operation of addition or
plus (+) as ultimate and indefinable, and let us postulate that
the associative as well as the commutative law holds for plus,
so that not only a + b = b + a but ^ + i> + £=(# + b) + c 9
In terms of these indefinables the symbols for the successive
integers can be defined as

2=1 + 1, 3=1 + 2, and 4=1+3....

We now can make the following series of equations, each one
derived from its predecessor by interchanging the integer sym-
bols and their definitions:

7 + 5 = 12

because by the definition of 5

7 + 5 = 7+ 1 +4

which by definition = 8 + 1+3

“ “ “ =9+1+2

“ “ “ =10+1 + 1

“ “ “ = 1 1 + 1 which is the definition of 12.

To you this may seem a trifling and amateurish achievement,
but to me it seemed very real and important. For had I not
succeeded in reducing the supposedly irreducible synthetic prop-
osition to a mere complex of analytic propositions or definitions?
And what then was left of the subsistential reality or eternal
objectivity of the numbers which had appealed with mystic
strength to Pythagoras and Plato? Instead of saying of the
numbers that they “have” symbols, should we not rather say
that they are symbols, and that their supposedly timeless rela-
tions are nothing but rhetorical hypostatizations of our own
quite temporal linguistic operations? Surely, I had gone nomi-

WM. PEPPERELL MONTAGUE 573

nalist with a vengeance! It was not until some years later that
I was shaken out of my complacency and filled with consterna-
tion by noticing that the neat little procedure by which I had
proved to my own satisfaction that 7 + 5=12 did itself have
not only a structure but a numerical structure and in fact the
identical numerical structure that I had flattered myself that I
had explained away. I took just five steps to reduce the original
synthetic proposition 7 + 5 = 12 to the final analytic or defin-
ing proposition 11 + 1 = 12. And if instead of diminishing
5 to 1 and building up 7 to 11, I had built up 5 to 11 and
diminished 7 to 1, thus 7 + 5 = 6 + i + 5 = 5+ i + 6 =
4+1 + 7 = 3 + 1 + 8 = 2 + 1+ 9=1 + 1 + 10 = 1 + 11
= 12, there would have been seven of these substitutions re-
quired. Generalizing we can say that any (synthetic) equation
of the type a + b = c can be reduced to the defining or analytic
equation (<; — 1) + 1 = £, either by the number of substitutive
steps equal to a or by the number of substitutive steps equal to
b. In short, in any transformation or translation of a pattern of
objective forms and relations into a series of substitutive steps
or operations with symbols , the pattern of the former will re-
appear in the latter . In other words, a map owes its practical
utility to its theoretical conformity to the reality that is mapped 3
therefore, it can never be regarded as self-sufficient, but must
always be regarded as a secondary system dependent upon and
determined in every detail of its structure by that objective re-
ality of which it is the guide. But if this is the case, how does
it happen that it is not recognized, and that even in high quar-
ters the illusion of nominalism still persists? There are, I think,
two reasons. The first reason is that in a nominalistic or sym-
bolic system the combination of practical utility with high tech-
nical elegance engenders in the minds of its creators a pride
and affection that is almost paternal in its tender intensity. This
is the subjective reason and it is based on the generic qualities
of human nature. The maker loves what he makes.

The second reason is less subjective and more specific, and is
to be found in the extraordinary completeness of the disguise
that the eternal truths of subsistential reality undergo when
translated into a temporal series of symbolic operations. The

FREEDOM

574

sequential procedure seems so obviously man-made and directed
to the fulfillment of human purposes technical and practical,
that it takes a tremendous effort to discover the underlying-
static structure to which the operations are indebted for their
entire meaning.

There is here a significant parallel in a certain current mis-
conception of the nature of judgment, which is shared in com-
mon by both idealists and pragmatists. Such judgments as
“Snow is white,” “Man is animal,” “S is P,” express, or sym-
bolize in words, denotative identities (total or partial), between
two connotations, or at least a coexistence in the same position
of the qualities designated by the subject and the qualities desig-
nated by the predicate. And if you prefer the modernistic
ARB , where R symbolizes any relation whatever of A to B ,
to the Aristotelian inclusion or exclusion of classes, the situation
is not altered. The object or content of the judgment, i.e., what
the judgment asserts, is a static structure, a propositional com-
plex, apprehended as a portion of objective reality ; and there
is nothing sequential about it. But the tongue cannot utter, and
the hand cannot write, more than one word at a time. So there
arises an illusion that the proposition asserted or “judgment
content” must share the sequential and active nature of the
process of asserting or “judgment utterance” and that a state-
ment about reality alters that reality, “breaks up an organic
whole into artificial fragments,” or something of the sort. Of
course nothing like this ever happens. When an astronomer
makes a judgment about the stars, the action is in the astrono-
mer, his tongue, or his fingers, and not in the stars at all, which
remain completely unchanged by the judgment passed upon
them.

And this fallacy of projecting the dynamic technique of ap-
prehending and symbolically reporting upon the static relations
that are apprehended and symbolically reported is facilitated by
the messy term “experience,” which is a word devised by the
devil himself to obscure the distinction between the act of cog-
nizing and the object cognized.

When I translated the objective structure 7 + 5 = 12 into
the sequence of analytic steps, I was, for the reason that I have

WM. PEPPERELL MONTAGUE $? $

been stating, deceived into thinking that I had explained away
the objective structure and that like the tourist in Professor
Whitehead’s story, I could substitute the guidebook or map for
the reality on which it was based. But now 1 may say (with
apologies to St. Augustine for using his famous words) that
having sinned like St. Paul, I can repent like St. Paul and ex-
hort those of you who are still guilty of the illusion of nomi-
nalism to join me in awakening to the irremovable reality of
Plato’s world of abstract forms and relations, be they symbol-
ized or be they not.

II. CONCERNING THE SECOND PROPOSITION

A second type of cause for the illusion of nominalism is to
be found in our freedom to select from the complex structures
of the Platonic world of subsistent forms any that happen to
please us. This power to select is wrongly interpreted as a
power to create, with the result that we arrive from a new
direction at the same old nominalistic illusion — the illusion that
the realm of essence and the relations of its constituents to one
another have no reality outside of our own intellectual acts and
the symbols or names that express them.

For more than two generations there has been talk of types
of space other than the space of Euclid and of new geometries,
especially those of Riemann and Lobachewsky in which the
Euclidean axiom of parallels is replaced by one or the other of
two opposing postulates. To the naive question as to which of
the three geometries, Euclidean, Riemannian, or Lobachew-
skian, is the “true” one, a playful but instructive reply could
be given in the form of a counterquestion. Of the three sets
of rules, those of tennis, of cricket, and of baseball, which set is
“true”? Obviously, the latter question at least would be mean-
ingless. The rules of one game are neither more true nor less
true than the rules of another. Rules are man-made and con-
ventional. Which rules are applied depends on which game, if
any, you choose to play.

You can say if you like, though it is not very enlightening,
that tennis rules are “true” for tennis, and that cricket and

FREEDOM

576

baseball rules are respectively “true” for those games. Tennis
might seem to have more objective reality than the other two
because it is played everywhere while cricket and baseball are
each for the most part played only in one country. In quite the
same way, so it is alleged, you can in pure geometry play the
Euclidean, Riemannian, or Lobachewskian game according to
your taste. Adopt the appropriate postulates or rules and go
ahead} each is internally self-consistent, and no one is more so
than the others. But if we were to ask the further question as
to which geometry most closely conforms to physical existence,
we should be told that it was the Euclidean; and then we
should be told further that the greater applicability of Euclid’s
geometry to physics had no more relevance to its mathematical
truth than had the wider prevalence of tennis to its truth or
validity as a game in comparison with other games. In short,
as long as you remain in the domain of abstract forms and rela-
tions, which is the domain of mathematics in its modern and
broader sense, it may seem that there is no such thing as “ob-
jective truth,” but only internal consistency and intellectual
convenience. And now having stated as plausibly as I could the
case for this type of nominalism I will give what seems to me
to be its refutation.

Whether I choose one set of mathematical postulates or an-
other is indeed a matter of arbitrary choice like the decision to
play one game or another, but if and when the postulates have
once been selected, then theorems follow with iron necessity.
(1) Euclidean, (2) Riemannian, and (3) Lobachewskian postu-
lates compel me whether I like it or not, on pain of self-contra-
diction, to infer that the sum of the angles of a triangle is
respectively (1) equal to, (2) greater than, (3) less than two
right angles. The situation is like that which confronted a cer-
tain small boy who liked the idea that seven times eight makes
seventy-eight. To a six-year-old, this sounds good and seems
plausible; but, alas, it is not true. Seven times eight persist in
making fifty-six, no matter how you wiggle them and no matter
how you pout and stamp.

It is in situations such as this that a child is for the first time

WM. PEPPERELL MONTAGUE 577

brought face to face with one of the awful truths of eternity.
He has to accept it and he had better find it pleasant. Here is
where the analogy with the rules of a game breaks down com-
pletely. I can alter the game’s rules in any way I like and at
any time in the course of my play. The worst that could happen
to me would be that spectators could call me silly — which I
probably would be — and tell me that this was “really hardly
cricket” 3 to which 1 could make the unanswerable retort that
it was my kind of “cricket” and that I liked it, and nothing
more need be said!

One specific reason for the failure to recognize the truth for
what it is is the preoccupation with the spatio-temporal Zusam-
menhmg of existence, in which so many people are morbidly
interested. Hence the vogue of the hypothetical proposition. If
f y then q. If there’s an then there’s a B. If Riemann’s postu-
lates applied to the existing world, the then existing triangles
would have the sum of their angles greater than two right
angles. But the tight little isle of existence is set within the
ocean of subsistence. Its actuality is an infinitesimal fragment of
the infinity of possibilities. T he relations which those 'possibili-
ties sustain to one another are necessities . Back of every hypo-
thetical proposition about what would exist is a categorical prop-
osition about what does subsist. The reason why existing trian-
gles would be such and such if existing space were such and
such is because from all eternity certain abstract forms and their
relations have entailed or implied certain other quite definite
forms and relations. And the same sort of eternal categorical
truth lies behind the hypothetical truths that if there were seven
octets of stars, or atoms, or apples, the total of those objects
would be fifty-six rather than seventy-eight, and that if seven
of them were added to five of them, the total would be twelve
of them.

We can make symbolic guidebooks or maps that are both
useful and ornamental; and we can direct our attention to this
set of structures or to that. But the notion that because of these
privileges we can regard our procedures as self-contained and
self-sufficient, made out of whole cloth and dependent on noth-

FREEDOM

578

ing but our caprice and the linguistic operations in which that
caprice is symbolized, is to suffer from the illusion of nomi-
nalism.

CONCLUSION

THE GENUINE FREEDOM OF PLATONIC REALISM
CONTRASTED WITH THE SPURIOUS FREEDOM
OF NOMINALISM, SUBJECTIVISM, AND
LOGICAL POSITIVISM

Supposing that nominalism had been refuted and that Pla-
tonism had been vindicated, you might still quite naturally ask
as to the bearing of all that upon the nature of freedom or lib-
erty, which is the theme of this volume. I should begin my
reply with the reminder that a just cause can be mortally in-
jured by false claims made in its behalf. To ascribe to the hu-
man intellect a kind of freedom that is spurious and foolish is
to distract attention from the real freedom possessed by the
human will. Man’s liberty consists not in creating possibilities
but in realizing them.

We live and move and have our being in a threefold milieu of
Space and Time and Form. The structure of this triune Logos
is itself incapable of change; but within it and throughout it all
things change and flow. It is the eternal loom of formal possi-
bilities and abstract laws; and across it Nature’s shuttle cease-
lessly flies to and fro weaving the many-colored fabric of ex-
istence. The possibilities do not themselves dictate their realiza-
tion. The energies of matter by their quantity and distribution
determine that; and therein consists the world’s contingency.
But what for nature is contingency is for man with his intelli-
gence and power true freedom of the will. His vision of the
timeless realm of possibilities brings with it liberty to choose
and by spontaneous and unpredetermined effort to actualize the
higher or the lower of those possibilities at each successive mo-
ment of his life.

Charles Morris

Associate Professor of Philosophy) University of Chicago

THE MECHANISM OF FREEDOM

T HERE is an air of paradox about attempts to defend
freedom. For ultimately something can be defended
only by preserving the conditions under which it ex-
ists. But if freedom is dependent for its existence upon a deter-
minate set of conditions, then freedom itself seems to be caused
— and the statement of the determinate set of conditions would
be the statement of the “mechanism of freedom.”

This air of paradox is here invoked only to set in relief the
verbal confusions and subterfuges which dog discussions of
freedom. Metaphysical controversies crystallized in our com-
mon language have set up an opposition between freedom and
mechanism which could not exist without making it impossible
for freedom to be controlled and extended or for free activity
itself to be efficacious in the control of mechanisms. What is
needed, if these consequences are to be ruled out, is a clear un-
derstanding of what we are to mean by “mechanism” and “free-
dom” 5 then knowledge of the conditions under which freedom
occurs $ and finally a decision as to the degree to which freedom
is to be encouraged or thwarted by permitting or suppressing
the conditions upon which it depends.

II

What then is to be understood by “mechanism” and “free-
dom”? If the terms are to be utilizable in practice, we must be

. 579

FREEDOM

580

able to decide in any given case whether what is before us is or
is not an instance of mechanism or freedom. So the problem
becomes, under what circumstances shall we apply to something
the term “free” or “mechanical”?

Since “freedom” is commonly contrasted with “mechanism,”
we may first glance at the latter term. In actual practice the
ability to predict is taken as the test for the discovery of a
mechanism: eclipses can with high accuracy be predicted, so
their occurrence is said to be dependent upon a mechanism. In
so far as science aims to give statements upon which accurate
predictions can be made, science is in the very nature of the
case mechanistic, for the mechanical is the predictable, and pre-
diction is evidence for the existence of mechanisms. The mecha-
nistic character of science is, however, methodological rather
than metaphysical. Such statements as “the world is a mechani-
cal system,” “everything is determined,” “everything is pre-
dictable,” are but shorthand ways of saying that scientists have
in fact isolated many mechanisms, that there is no known limit
to predictability, and that the scientist as scientist must continu-
ally seek to widen the sphere of the predictable. That the ex-
pressions are programs rather than simply statements of fact
is attested by the circumstance that there are many occurrences
which cannot be predicted in terms of the knowledge available
at the time, and that even where prediction does obtain, there
are properties of the occurrence in question which were not pre-
dicted. Thus, in so far as we use terms empirically, we are, rela-
tive to our knowledge, living in a world characterized alike by
chance and mechanism, novelty and law. To say that “really”
there is no chance or novelty would be to affirm a body of
knowledge such that from it every true statement which ever
can be made can be deduced. Such an affirmation is clearly only
a hypothesis, and not a dogma, since such a body of knowledge
certainly does not now exist. The fact, then, that science in the
nature of the case is mechanistic in method does not necessitate
a mechanistic metaphysics and cannot lead to the denial of
whatever chance and novelty the world, relative to existing
knowledge, does in fact contain.

In so far as “freedom” means simply the absence of mecha-

CHARLES MORRIS

581

nism, then freedom, in the sense of chance and novelty, is cer-
tainly a property of nature on the same empirical level as law-
fulness or mechanism. Even in such a usage of the term “free-
dom,” we could investigate the general conditions of chance
and attempt in some sense to control it. For if “chance” is a
term involving relativity to knowledge, we could increase the
precarious nature of our world by stopping the increase of
knowledge and preventing the use of what knowledge is avail-
able, or by so changing the world that the present factual basis
used for determining expectations is destroyed. If, for example,
the family were abolished, then, provided the psychologists are
even partly correct, many present mechanisms of human be-
havior dependent upon early life within the family would dis-
appear, and much would occur that our present knowledge
would not be able to predict.

Ill

A second and common use of “freedom” is even more clearly
compatible with the notion of mechanism and the theoretical
possibility of the control of freedom. When the physicist speaks
of a “freely vibrating body,” the adverb “freely” merely indi-
cates that nothing opposes the vibration in question. Freedom
in this sense of unimpeded action is a character common to
physical bodies and living beings. An organism is free with
respect to a certain activity if the environment or the other ac-
tivities of the organism support the carrying out of the activity
in question. A man in prison may not be free to walk at will,
but may be free to breathe; internal inhibitory factors may pre-
vent him from being free to write or to speak. In this sense of
freedom, no living being is completely free or entirely without
freedom. Since such freedom is a property of an activity, the
conditions under which the activity can operate are identical
with the conditions of freedom. These conditions are amenable
to investigation, and once they are determined the appearance
and course of the activity can be controlled. The problem as to
which activities should be developed and how far they should
be allowed to operate freely is a very complicated one, and as

FREEDOM

582

the problem of control ultimately becomes a moral one, it is
best to postpone for a moment the consideration of the issues
involved,

IV

The third and most important usage of the term “freedom”
centers around the problem of choice. A being is free in this
sense to the degree that the course of his life is selected from
among various possible alternatives ; free action is then chosen
action.

A jungle is before us at this point, and we must move warily.
For the notion of choice is a difficult one, and the verbal ghosts
of past philosophical reflections turn us away from the analysis
of concrete situations. In this jungle we easily find ourselves
lapsing into the absolute opposition of freedom and mechanism,
and perhaps, in the manner of Kant, placing human freedom
beyond the realm of empirical description because we are unable
to find, within natural processes, a place for it consistent with
the admission of the mechanistic orientation of science.

Let us consider the hypothetical case of an animal that re-
sponds only to what it immediately comes in contact with, so
that it responds to nothing as a sign of something else. If a
suitable food object came in contact with the hungry animal it
would seize it, but it would not, in the case imagined, see the
object at a distance or respond to any features of its immediate
environment as signs of what exists beyond this immediate en-
vironment. Such an animal, as living, would have needs and
impulses, but would be at the mercy of its immediate environ-
ment for the satisfaction of these needs and impulses. Its be-
havior might be “free” in the first two senses of the word (it
might show novel properties, and its impulses might under
fortunate circumstances be unimpeded in their expression), but
the behavior would not be free in the sense of chosen, since it
would not be a selection out of envisaged alternatives, but
simply a function of the physiological state of the animal and
the immediate environment.

The situation becomes more complicated if we add to the
animal’s equipment the ability to “perceive” objects at a dis-

CHARLES MORRIS

583

tance. Such perception involves sign processes, in that some
present clue — a color or shape or sound or contact — is responded
to in such a way as to take account of objects and their prop-
erties which are not in the immediate neighborhood of the
organism. The animal now pursues a food object seen at a dis-
tance, and guides its behavior to this object in terms of sensory
cues. Thus the conduct of the organism is in part a function of
things indicated by signs. A new conception of freedom begins
to emerge: it might be said that the animal is “free” from his
immediate environment in the sense (and to the degree) that
its conduct is not solely a function of its immediate environ-
ment. “Free behavior” begins to mean “behavior directed by
the operation of signs.”

v

There is no absolute line to be drawn between the behavior
of an animal that perceives and the behavior of the conceptually
thinking human being; it is a terminological matter whether all
sign-controlled behavior is to be designated as free behavior or
whether this term is to be applied only to the most compli-
cated phases of such behavior. Nevertheless, the differences,
while differences in a continuum, are important, and there are
grounds for preferring to restrict “free behavior,” in the third
sense of the term, to such behavior as involves the symbolical
indication of alternative courses of action and the selection of
one such course of action in and through the process of sym-
bolical indication.

Free behavior in this restricted sense is perhaps confined to
human beings. The animal that perceives uses signs, and in so
doing lives within a wider temporal and spatial world, but the
signs to which he reacts are supplied by the immediate world —
and if the clues are not given him, the sign-guided behavior
does not take place. Even when signs are operative in such an
animal, the embeddedness of the sign in the immediate world
makes it impossible to hold on to the sign in order to explore,
by related signs and tentative behavior, the alternative courses
of action which correlate with the various indications furnished
by what is operating as a sign. So that while the animal “chooses”

FREEDOM

584

in the vague sense that among competing tendencies to behavior
one action rather than another does in fact take place, the proc-
ess does not involve choice in the complex sense that the al-
ternative courses of behavior, together with certain of their
consequences, are symbolically indicated, such indication being
a factor in producing the resultant behavior.

It was the belief of George H. Mead that free behavior, in
this sense of chosen behavior, was the unique prerogative of
man, and that this humanly distinctive type of behavior was
made possible through the appearance of spoken language. For
in speech with others and himself man is easily able to keep the
sign operative independent of the immediate environment; to
bring before himself for consideration (by the interrelationship
of signs) the consequences of a mode of action; and to try out
experimentally alternative modes of action by stimulating him-
self through various sign combinations. Thus as a result of sign
functioning at the linguistic level the human being reacts to a
world which extends indefinitely beyond his immediate envi-
ronment and his perceived environment, and is able to lay out
courses of action after consideration of the consequences of vari-
ous possible alternatives. In this way freedom from the neigh-
boring environment is greatly extended and conscious choice
takes on an increasingly greater role and significance.

VI

Freedom of choice, so conceived, presents no obstacle to
mechanistic science and has nothing to fear (indeed, everything
to gain) from the uncovering by science of as many mechanisms
as possible — including the mechanism of choice.

If such freedom is dependent upon the operation of signs,
then it is possible to consider the conditions under which signs
function, and investigate the details of that functioning — tasks
which form an essential part of the science of signs. If, in the
case of man, language plays such an important function, it fol-
lows that to a large extent the conditions of individual freedom
are social in origin. This fact becomes of special importance if
one goes on to agree with Mead’s position (stated in Mind ,

CHARLES MORRIS

585

Self, and Society) that human mentality is to be equated with
the functioning of signs at the linguistic level, and that selfhood
(in the sense of self-consciousness) arises in the same process.
For it then turns out that the self-conscious, thinking individual
is dependent for his appearance upon participation in a social
process in which he takes over into himself processes operative
in the objective social structure of which he is a member. The
character of the individuaPs thought processes (whether, for
instance, they are to be of a scientific temper or not) is then
amenable to control by the manipulation of the social environ-
ment of the individual. Freedom, in the sense of making choices
in the light of symbolically indicated consequences of alterna-
tive courses of action, is relative to the sign repertory and to
the habits of sign usage which an individual is allowed to ac-
quire. The implication of this fact is that men can be “made”
free or kept from being free, and the isolation of the mechanism
of freedom, as the isolation of all mechanisms, places great
power and responsibility in the hands of those who direct
society.

From the standpoint of the reflective individual the reliable
knowledge of physical, biological, and social mechanisms is in
importance equal to (or greater than) the knowledge of his
own processes of reflection. For if he is to act intelligently in
the light of the consequences of contemplated action, he must
know what the consequences in fact will be. He must be able
to predict accurately, and so possess scientific knowledge —
knowledge of mechanisms. Without such knowledge he cannot
wisely guide his present behavior even though a multiplicity of
signs operates in such behavior, for if the reference of the signs
is unsure, he cannot count on what will turn up if he embarks
on a course of action. This is of course as true in regard to
other persons and to himself (including his own reflective
mechanisms) as it is in regard to physical processes. Hence
arises the interesting conclusion that the more successful science
is in isolating mechanisms, the more it advances the cause of
freedom. Paradoxically put, the more mechanism, the more
freedom. Put without paradox, the more scientific knowledge
the individual possesses, the better able is he to guide his pres-

FREEDOM

586

ent behavior through the consideration of the consequences of
alternative courses of action.

The knowledge does not of course uniquely determine the
resultant action. Regardless of what knowledge is utilized in the
act, the resultant act may be freer in some or all of the analyzed
senses of the term “freedom”: the act may be less predictable
(since available predictions have been utilized by the act) 3
action may be more expressive of the total interests of the or-
ganism (since the various impulses have had a voice in deter-
mining the result) 3 the final action remains an act of free
choice (in the sense that even if the act could be predicted it
would still be an act selected in the process of considering the
consequences of various courses of action).

VII

If the preceding analysis is in the main sound, the backbone
of the ancient opposition between freedom and mechanism
should be broken, and it is not necessary to kick the corpse in
prolonging the argument. Whether the free is taken as the un-
predictable or the unimpeded or the chosen, it is in any case a
part of the same nature which manifests predictability, hin-
drances, and blindness 3 in every case it is a matter of degree 3 in
every case it is open to scientific study and to control. The de-
tailed study of the mechanisms involved is a task for science,
and the finding and stating of the results must be left to science.

There remain, however, certain large problems in connection
with control which are capable of general discussion. Since the
problem of control ultimately runs into moral issues, it is neces-
sary to bring morality specifically into our purview. And since
the term “moral” is subject to wide variations in usage, it is
necessary — if we are to remain empirical — to specify the present
usage of the term. “Moral attitude” shall denote the attitude
which attempts to bring about the maximum satisfaction of in-
terests when interests are in conflict (i.e., when the satisfaction
of an interest affects the satisfaction of other interests). The
moral attitude is thus itself an interest in the maximum satis-
faction of a system of interacting interests. A person is moral

CHARLES MORRIS

587

to the degree that this interest is operative 5 a specific act is
morally better than some other act to the degree that it gives
more satisfaction to a specific system of interests. With this
usage of terms, the moral interest becomes one interest among
others, and to the degree that the terms “interest” and “satis-
faction of interest” are used empirically, it is possible to deter-
mine whether a person is moral or not, and whether a particular
act is morally better in a specific situation than another act.

It is clearly to the advantage of the moral interest that each
person have this interest, for the heart of morality is found in
sensitivity to conflicting interests in specific situations, and only
in so far as each person has such a sensitivity can maximum jus-
tice be done to realizing the potentialities of such situations. It
is also necessary, if the moral goal is to be progressively real-
ized, that each individual be equipped with the tools necessary
for moral action. Among such tools are the moral injunctions
or prescriptions which embody accumulated moral experience.
There are recurrent types of situations which men have found
it wise to meet in such and such a way, and this wisdom consti-
tutes the specific “oughts” of morality. But the rule-of-thumb
application of specific moral injunctions is simply one tool of
the moral life and not its essential feature. For such application
blurs the differences between situations 5 the moral injunctions
of any time, since they are prescriptions of habitual actions, tend
to lag behind the knowledge and the techniques available at the
time. It follows that scientific knowledge and the scientific atti-
tude are also tools of basic importance for morality: scientific
knowledge, because such knowledge is necessary to find out the
existing system of interests and the effects of alternative actions
on the system; the scientific attitude, because the process of
formulating, selecting, and trying out a hypothesis as to a course
of moral action is in all essentials the same as formulating and
controlling any hypothesis — and the method of science repre-
sents the most highly developed form of this process.

The moral life, from its very nature, requires that the moral
interest be developed in each individual, and that each indi-
vidual be given the best moral experience, scientific knowledge,
and scientific techniques available. The moral life involves tol-

FREEDOM

588

eration of freedom in ail senses of the term, for it requires the
intelligent choice of an action to remove a conflict of actions,
and in acting upon such choice new elements of novelty are in-
troduced into human relations. If moral injunctions tend to
mechanize life, the moral process out of which such injunctions
spring, and within which they are merely one agency, is part
and parcel of life’s free renewal.

VIII

The moral life is committed to the increase of freedom in all
individuals. To what is democracy committed?

Various are the usages of the term “democracy,” and a choice
must be indicated. We choose the moral interpretation of de-
mocracy which Dewey has given; put in terms we have been
using, democracy is the acceptance of the moral attitude as a
general principle of action. Democracy so conceived would in-
volve the extension to social relations at large of the pattern of
moral relations between smaller groups of individuals. It would
aim to make every individual a consciously determining factor
in the evolution of society. It would devise (and continually
revise) the economic, political, and educational institutions by
which each individual can be made a moral participant in the
life of the community. It would implant the moral interest in
its members and make available to them the most accurate
knowledge and the best techniques of reflection and action. It
would seek out the mechanisms of freedom, and it would ex-
tend — thoughtfully and morally — the conditions under which
freedom flourishes.

The moral interest — and so democracy as its generalization —
is one interest among others. It is in no individual and no soci-
ety the sole interest in terms of which other interests are con-
trolled. It is an attitude and not a dogma; it can be accepted
or rejected. There are many other bases actually used to deter-
mine the amount and extent of freedom permitted in a given
culture. Such bases all involve the selection of some interest
other than the moral interest as norm (and in general this se-
lected interest is the interest of some specific group of people).

CHARLES MORRIS

589

Freedom is then controlled in the service of this selected inter-
est, and the direction of human experience and social organiza-
tion is prescribed within the limit set by this interest. Democ-
racy, as Dewey states, is the only attitude which trusts men to
develop, correct, and modify all their norms in the very process
of experience itself. For according to the moral attitude no
other interest which men have or will develop is to be left out
of account — and in this sense the moral interest is not a com-
petitor to any interest but a way of dealing with all interests.
It sets no limit to the interests men will develop, nor does it
prescribe the human future. It merely seeks that human life
have the fullest possible value at each stage; it is willing to
allow any future to emerge which emerges within the frame-
work of the moral process.

Freedom is always a matter of degree and always operates
under determinate conditions; its control is always a specific
problem. A democratic society would favor all forms of free-
dom compatible with and required by the moral process. A
moral democracy is a society of free men freely choosing at each
moment its own future.

Raphael Demos

Associate Professor of Philosophy , Harvard University

HUMAN FREEDOM — POSITIVE
AND NEGATIVE

I

I N this essay I shall argue that the notion of freedom is
required by our experience of choice and in order to vali-
date our practical judgments $ after clarifying the meaning
of freedom, I shall defend the view that the assertion of hu-
man freedom is part of any sound philosophy.

a. The experience of choice . Freedom is an element disclosed
in my awareness of myself as choosing, deciding, acting, some-
what as the relation “between” is disclosed in my awareness of
my perceptual field. It is worth noting that freedom is not re-
vealed in moral experience alone, but is in fact prior to it. A
man may conceivably have no sense of right or wrong 5 he may
be deciding what to do in complete oblivion of what he ought
to do. He may nevertheless be aware while so deciding that he
is free, for the decision to recognize moral standards or the de-
cision to discard or ignore them is itself a free choice. In short,
freedom is an ingredient of human choice, moral or otherwise.

b . Practical judgments . I hold myself — and society at large
holds me— responsible for my choices. There is a set of attitudes
and judgments which, by attributing responsibility to the indi-
vidual for his acts, affirms him, by implication, to be free $ and
this set forms part of what may be called the common-sense
view of human conduct. Such a common-sense view is not neces-
sarily an inference from human experience and should be re-

RAPHAEL DEMOS

591

garded as a component additional to the latter. Common sense,
whether about the external world — its existence and nature — or
about human conduct, may well consist of a set of frimary
judgments, primary in the sense that they are not derived from
an analysis of experience, and indeed are not deduced from any
other set of propositions. Thus conceived, common sense is
surely relevant to the construction of an adequate philosophical
doctrine of the real.

Judgments of common sense concerning human conduct I
shall call practical judgments, dividing the latter into moral
and nonmoral judgments. I shall now consider the implica-
tions of moral judgments. After the choice has been made, I
may congratulate myself, or I may feel remorse over my deci-
sion. Or my friends and the public may blame me or praise
me 3 their verdict will be, “Well done, thou faithful servant,”
or alternatively, “Badly done, thou unfaithful servant.” I am
judged praiseworthy or blameworthy because it is assumed that
my choice was made freely. Take the notion of the “ought” as
a component of moral judgments. I judge concerning myself
that I ought to do thus and so 3 you judge concerning me that
I ought not to have done thus and so. The judgment that A
ought to do Y is a joint judgment that Y is right and that A is
free to choose it.

II

Our next step is to clarify the content of the experience of
choice and of the implications of practical judgment. Two pre-
liminary points must be made. In the first place, the statement
that all human actions are free is too broad 3 there may well be
actions which are not free. We will restrict our assertion to read
“some human actions are free.” In the second place, freedom
is a property of decision, not of action 3 or of action in so far
as it is a result of free decision. The moment of freedom is the
moment at which I make up my mind as to what to do or what
to be. Freedom pertains not to the outward, peripheral, public
behavior, but to the inward series of events prior to the action,
during which the human being envisages several alternatives
of action (or even one alternative) and then decides. Thus, it

FREEDOM

59 ^

is choice, not action, which is free. But choice too is action ; and
in what follows, when the term “action 55 (or “conduct 55 ) is used
as a subject for the predicate, “free , 55 it will refer usually to
that species of action which is choice.

The notion of freedom involves two elements: the notion
of causality and the notion of real possibility.

a. The judgment that A is responsible for his acts and di-
rectly for his choices is valid only if it is true that A is a cause;
the judgment of responsibility attributes agency to A. I am now
using the conception of causality naively, as when one says, “/
did it , 55 or “He did it . 55 I am aware of my decision as mine, and
as issuing from me. And if I blame you for your acts, I cer-
tainly mean that the acts are referable to you as the agent. The
notion of legal responsibility for crime cannot stand unless it
be assumed that the man is a cause of his actions.

b. The other element of freedom is potentiality. When I say
that A ought to do Y, I mean that A may or may not do Y.
When, after deliberation, A chooses Y, A is aware that he
might have chosen X. Choice is a selection among real possi-
bilities. I call a future event Y a real possibility whenever,
given the set of present or past conditions A, Y is not neces-
sary. Surely the assumption of real possibility is involved in
moral judgment; you blame me for what I have done because,
being what I am, I could have acted otherwise.

This notion of real possibility may be appropriately con-
trasted with Aristotle 5 s notion of potentiality. Take a man by
the name of Socrates; we will say that Socrates may or may
not sit in the near future. Aristotle would maintain that Soc-
rates (the substance) contains the opposite potentialities of sit-
ting and not sitting. But Aristotle would also maintain that if
all the conditions were specified — in the universe as well as
in Socrates — then only one of the alternatives is possible. In
short, by calling sitting and not-sitting potentialities of Socrates,
Aristotle means that they are not necessitated by the essence of
Socrates; he does not mean that they are not necessitated once
the other factors, besides the essence of Socrates, are given.
By real possibility I mean absence of necessitation given all

RAPHAEL DEMOS

593

the conditions. Supposing I have adopted alternative Y ; then,
given myself and my nature, and given the whole universe,
the adoption of alternative Y is nevertheless not necessary . 1

By bringing the two components of freedom into one state-
ment, we may conclude that “A chose Y freely” means that
A is the cause of Y, and that Y is not necessary, given the
total situation, inclusive of A. It is unfortunate that in our
normal usage the word freedom suggests only one of these
elements, namely, absence of necessitation. By freedom, in this
essay, I mean something negative and something positive: that
the choice was not necessary, and that the choice was made by
the agent (in the sense above mentioned that “he did it”). It
will be found as we proceed that the various traditional theories
of freedom generally fail, because they provide either for the
one or for the other component of freedom, but not for both.

Ill

Before we go on in the direction indicated, I will attempt
to remove certain formidable obstacles in our path. Why trou-
ble to analyze the conception of freedom, since we know that
everything is determined? As for the presumed bases of the
conception — the experience of choice and the content of prac-
tical judgments — why take them seriously at all? Let us give
the floor to Spinoza, one of the foremost spokesmen of this
view.

The infant believes that it is by free will that it seeks the breast;
the angry boy believes that by free will he wishes vengeance; the
timid man thinks that it is with free will he seeks flight; the drunkard
believes that by a free command of his mind he speaks the things
which when sober he wishes he had left unsaid. Thus the madman,
the chatterer, the boy, and others of the same kind, all believe that
they speak by a free command of the mind, whilst in truth they
have no power to restrain the impulse which they have to speak; so

1 Evidently, the notion of necessity (and its absence) employed in this es-
say is a relational one. Thus, X is — or is not — necessary, in relation to Y.
In speaking of the absence of any necessity for X, absolutely, I mean that
X is not necessary relatively to all the actualities in the universe.

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594

that experience itself, no less than reason, clearly teaches that men
believe themselves to be free simply because they are conscious of their
actions, and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined . 2

The so-called experience of freedom in choice is an illusion.
Our actions are necessitated not only by our individual make-
up, but by nature at large, or rather, our character is deter-
mined by the nature of things. We arrive on the threshold of
existence at the conclusion of a long universal process $ and,
unaware of the origins of our being, we have the delusion that
each of us is a master of his destiny. Imagine, suggests Spinoza,
a stone hurled high by man 3 imagine further that the stone,
as it reaches the peak of its curve, comes to consciousness. The
stone would then naturally think itself free because it is igno-
rant of the forces that launched it 5 and the stone would con-
gratulate itself on its success in rising so high. So are we, human
beings, missiles flung into the space of life by the hand of na-
ture, and we delude ourselves with the thought that the trajec-
tory of our lives is traced by our will.

Spinoza goes on to deny any validity to the ethical cate-
gories. The judgment, “I ought to do Y,” is meaningless,
for I will do what I will do. Spinoza is the mouthpiece of
rationalism, and his views are echoed by science with its in-
sistence that every event is determined by its antecedents.
(At least, this is the standpoint of classical science.) Now ra-
tionalism, philosophical or scientific, may be a correct doctrine,
but it must not be allowed to close the door at the very outset
to the implications of ethical judgments. The principle that
everything is determined, that what has happened has hap-
pened necessarily, that what has not happened is impossible,
that, in short, there is no real possibility — all this, as is obvious
from its very generality, is not an inference from experience,
but an anticipation of experience. It belongs to the class of
judgments which we have called primary. While we may grant
the rationalistic contention that freedom is a postulate, we will
insist that necessity is a postulate too. And if so, there is no
justification for demanding that the postulate of freedom be

2 Ethics , Part II, Prop. II, Scholium .

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595

rejected because it does not conform to the postulate of neces-
sity. We may recall that Kant asserted the opposite of Spi-
noza’s contention ; whereas Spinoza assumed that the ration-
alistic postulate is prior and then proceeded to test the ethical
judgments by reference to it, Kant maintained that the moral
categories are prior and so concluded that the categories of the
intellect are applicable to phenomena alone, relative to the
knowing subject and devoid of ontological validity. In short,
if you propose to treat postulates as premises, you may just
as well start with the ethical as with the rationalistic postulates.

The problem may be formulated as follows. There are two
regions of common sense: one is that of rationalism and science,
concerned primarily with objects, to be designated hereafter
as the province of theoretical reason; the other region is that
of practical common sense, concerned with subjects, persons,
their relations and their actions, designated hereafter as the
province of practical reason. Each of these provinces alike con-
sists of tw r o levels, one that of experience and the other that
of postulation. We will say that the two levels — experiential
and postulational — in each field respectively, constitute the set
of beliefs in that province. The beliefs of practical reason em-
brace the experience of freedom, and the postulates of blame,
praise, responsibility, and the ought. The beliefs of theoretical
reason include the observation of phenomena along with the
postulates of determinism, of laws of nature, and other postu-
lates which w r e need not mention in this connection. It is worthy
of note that both regions include a factor of postulation — a
group of primary judgments and fundamental conceptions by
which to interpret their respective classes of data. No doubt,
too, there is an interplay between the two regions and between
the two levels in each region. Postulates define experience, and
experience modifies postulates.

Common sense, both in its primitive and in its enlightened
form, is complex; it consists of a multiplicity of regions, scien-
tific, theoretical, practical, religious, esthetic. Also, common
sense undergoes development, in that each region individually
changes and, further, in that the relation of the regions to one
.another is altered. Thus, at different times, one or another

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region acquires domination over the rest. There are currents
and fashions in the history of thought. At certain epochs, espe-
cially during the Middle Ages, the religious tradition was
supreme over the other traditions; our present epoch is char-
acterized by the supremacy of the scientific mentality. We are
likely to test all the rest of our beliefs by their conformity
with scientific belief; in short, we treat the former as soft data,
while relatively to these, we treat the scientific beliefs as hard
data. It is important to realize that this is a fashion; and that
it is the duty of the philosopher to rise above fashions, to criti-
cize current dogmatisms, to refuse the claim of a postulate to
play the role of a premise, and to consider common sense in
its totality.

The scientist demands universality; he regards as data rele-
vant to the construction of theories only those sense impres-
sions which are accessible to all minds under specifiable and
controllable conditions; thus, he excludes dreams and castles
in the air from his purview. He defines the real as the class
of experiences which are intersub jective. The scientist demands
clarity, holding that only those concepts have meaning which
have denotation in “real” experience, or perhaps which can
be described operationally. With respect to theories, the scien-
tist demands predictiveness regarding the future, explanatori-
ness of the given, and simplicity (more picturesquely known
as Occam’s razor). These demands of universality, clarity, pre-
dictiveness, and simplicity are no more than rules of scientific
procedure, rules adopted for the sake of results, valid with
respect to certain ends and utilities and therefore arbitrary from
any ultimate point of view. Since these rules are valid only
within the boundaries of their ends, they cannot be set up as
criteria for regions of common sense in which these ends do
not apply. When the scientist rejects the notions and judgments
of the moralist, when he argues that the experience of freedom
must be regarded as an illusion because — so he says — all events
are determined, or when he rejects the notion of free choice
because it makes prediction of human conduct impossible, when
he treats the ought as a confused idea because, in its assump-
tion of real possibility, it is inconsistent with the law of causal-

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597

ity, he is unwarrantably treating the principle of determinism
as an immanent law of nature, and confusing a demand with
a fact. In brief, he is converting a prescription into a description.

We may be told that the demand of determinism is a need
of our nature ; that, in fact, we cannot help asking for a cause
of whatever happens. But so is the attitude of holding per-
sons responsible for their acts a need of our nature 5 we cannot
help praising and blaming choices. Moreover, the ought is an
ingredient in all assertion, theoretical as well as practical. Truth
is what we ought to believe. Believing is a human activity; all
cognition, in a sense, is part of the province of ethics. To inval-
idate the ought is to invalidate the process of theoretical reason,
and thus to invalidate the reasons urged against the ought.

It appears then that the appeal to w T hat is supposed to be
our nature does not help solve our problem. I conclude that
we should take a naive attitude toward the beliefs of practical
reason. If it be a fact that they disagree with those of theo-
retical reason, they are nonetheless part of common sense. At
the outset, they must be treated as data, in the same way as
the beliefs of theoretical reason. If the two sets of beliefs con-
tradict each other, obviously they cannot both be true. But the
way to remove the contradiction is not by rejecting the prac-
tical beliefs out of hand, for then we would be unwarrantably
assuming that theoretical judgments are “true” and valid in
some absolute sense, independently of the ends to which they
are relative. And although we should be naive at the outset,
we should not remain so. In our capacity as philosophers, we
should throw both theoretical and practical beliefs into the
melting-pot, taking neither as dogmas and treating all as soft
data. In the meanwhile, our immediate task is to formulate as
explicitly as we can the implications of practical belief.

IV

Self-determination . We will now consider attempts to provide
for freedom within the framework of theoretical reason, i.e., on
the assumption that all events are determined.

a. One line of argument proceeds by opposing determinism

59^ FREEDOM

to fatalism. A man is fated if his nature or desires count in no
way in the production of his actions; but he is free in so far
as they do count. I am responsible for my actions because in
the chain of causes my desires are a link. G. E. Moore main-
tains that the consciousness of freedom is the awareness that
I would have acted otherwise had I chosen otherwise; in short,
that my action is the outcome of my choice. 3 This view estab-
lishes a contrast between external and internal necessitation,
denying the first while asserting the second.

What then of my desire; could I have helped desiring as
I did? What then of my choice; could I have chosen other-
wise? On this view, so far as I can see, I could not. My desire
and my choice are links in the chain preceded by other links;
they are themselves determined products of heredity and en-
vironment. I do not regard this objection as relevant. On the
one hand, it is possible that I should be free in my choices
while I am part of nature; on the other — and this is the impor-
tant point — it is possible that I should lack freedom even
though my choices are wholly determined by myself, remotely
as well as proximately. The issue is not between external and
internal determination, but between determination itself and
its absence. Our point will become clearer when we consider
Spinoza’s doctrine of self-determination — a doctrine in which
the question of the external derivation of choice does not arise.

b. Spinoza maintains that I am free in so far as 1 am wholly
self-determined — that is to say, my act is the outcome of my
nature, and my nature is the outcome of nothing outside my-
self. Thus, the totality of assignable causes — proximate or re-
mote — of the act is located entirely within the self. God is free
because his acts are determined by his nature and by nothing
else; for there is nothing outside God. So is man free when he
realizes his identity with God, Inasmuch as the notion of man’s
identity with God is difficult to grasp, we may shift our ground
and ask whether Spinoza’s God is free, and whether man, were
he like Spinoza’s God, would be free. Now, Spinoza’s God
is not externally determined; nevertheless it is true that he is
determined by his nature. Given his essence, his actions are

3 Ethics , pp. 28-31 j see also Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, p. 205.

RAPHAEL DEMOS

599

necessary; and the same would be true of man’s actions were
man like God. It follows that in Spinoza’s view there is no real
possibility, that the ought is meaningless, that praise and blame
are invalid. In fact, Spinoza maintains that the categories of
ethics are confused ideas. And this is precisely our point — that
the notion of self-determination is incompatible with the impli-
cations of our practical beliefs. To conclude, the contrast be-
tween fatalism and determinism is irrelevant; it is not external
determination that makes the difficulty, but the fact of any
determination, internal or external. So long as God and man
must do what they will do, they are not blameworthy or praise-
worthy, they are not free.

V

The Supremacy of Reason over Aff elite. In this section I
will investigate still another variant of the doctrine of self-
determinism — namely, one in which the act is explained by
reference not to appetite but to reason in man. This is the
teleological — as opposed to the mechanistic— account of human
conduct. Thinkers like Hume and John Stuart Mill have de-
scribed human action in terms analogous to those of physical
action. When man deliberates between several alternatives, he
is impelled by a number of different motives. Each motive
has a certain force; and the outcome of deliberation is, so
to speak, a resultant of the composition of forces, in which
the most powerful of the motives, or of a group of motives,
determines what the action will be. Contrasted with the above
we have the views of the thinkers like Plato or Kant who deny
that action is determined in a mechanical way. Man acts for
a reason, not from a cause; he acts from purposes, not from
desires; he acts owing to the persuasiveness of ideals, not
through the compulsion of appetite. Thus man is free, because
he is exempt from mechanical determination. My answer will
be that finalism, no less than mechanism, is a doctrine in which
the action is necessary and according to which therefore man
is not free. I will consider the views of Plato in more detail,
ignoring, for the purposes of our analysis, the differences, if
such exist, between the ideas of Plato and those of Socrates.

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600

Plato holds that virtue is knowledge 5 that is to say, that if
we know the good we will do it. Appetites impel man in vari-
ous directions but he acts from what he believes to be good. For
all men always love the good, and no one is wicked volun-
tarily. It is true that men often act wickedly, but the reason is
that they have misconceived the nature of the good. They de-
sired to do the right 5 they have, in fact, done the wrong thing
because they took the wrong to be right. The task of the mor-
alist is to establish a harmony between man’s knowledge and
his love of the good — in short, to enlighten him as to the real
nature of the good.

I submit that necessitation by reason is no less determina-
tion than necessitation by appetite. On Plato’s view, to know
is to do; you cannot act contrary to your reason. Moreover, man
cannot go wrong (or, at least, wish the wrong) because all men
seek the good, and cannot help seeking it. No man can really
be wicked. But moral freedom is the ability to do the wrong
equally with the right; choice is the choice between good and
evil. In terms of Christian doctrine, man’s freedom consists in
the fact that he may obey or disobey the will of God; other-
wise, sin would be a meaningless term. Yet, on Plato’s doc-
trine, man cannot consciously choose evil.

Thus, it is not enough to hold that choice is for a reason, or
according to a purpose; there must also be choice of purpose,
if man is to be free. The difference between the conception of
the self as cognizing and seeking values, on the one hand, and
that of the self as an aggregate of interacting motives, on the
other, is not a relevant difference. Freedom is freedom to reject
values and ideals, as well as to rise above motives.

Kant’s position is essentially not different from Plato’s.
There is appetite, and there is reason in man. Reason recog-
nizes the moral law and respects it; appetite aims at pleasure.
Yet, in fact, moral choice is a choice between reason and appe-
tite. By identifying the self with reason, both Plato and Kant
make freedom impossible, no less than Hume and John Stuart
Mill do, who identify the self with appetite. To repeat — the
situation of ethical choice is one in which the agent decides
whether to follow reason or desire. Such a situation can obtain

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601

only when there exists a self that is independent of both reason
and desire, deciding as to the relative claims of each. In genu-
inely practical action, reason and desire are not agents but data
for the self which is acting. The notion of freedom drives us to
a construction of human nature in which the self is distinguished
on the one hand from reason, and on the other from appetite.
Plato and Kant reduce the self to its data, leaving no place for
an agent of choice.

Our conclusion is that the doctrine of self-determination in
all its variants fails to supply the requisite of real possibility.
The merit of the doctrine of indeterminism lies precisely in
the fact that it tries to make a place for real possibility , it has
the demerit, however, of ignoring the other of the two requi-
sites, namely, agency.

VI

Indeterminism. One might have supposed that asses could
play no part in the development of culture ; yet there are two
asses which occupy prominent roles in the history of thought.
One is Balaam’s ass, the other is Buridan’s assj Balaam’s ass is
noted for its independence of spirit, Buridan’s ass for its abject-
ness of spirit. It is with Buridan’s ass that we are now concerned.
The story is familiar. Buridan’s ass, being extremely hungry,
was given food by its keeper, in the form of two bags of oats,
one of which was placed on its right and the other on its left,
both bags being placed at equal distances from the ass. Now
since, furthermore, the two bags were exactly alike, both con-
taining the same amount and quality of oats, the ass had no
reason to choose the one bag rather than the other. The ass,
then, was unable to make up its mind and though ravenous
with hunger, failed to eat at all. In the midst of plenty, it
starved to death. For sheer dramatic intensity, this story is
paralleled only by the myth of Achilles and the tortoise, in
our philosophical literature. The tragedy of Buridan’s ass con-
forms to most of the Aristotelian canons, especially to that
concerning the unity of action or — might we say — faction. It
evokes the emotion of pity and purges us of it 5 but — and here is
the point — it does not evoke the emotion of terror. The flaw

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in the ass to which the tragic outcome is directly traceable
consists in the fact that the ass was without freedom of choice;
and men are exempt from this flaw. Buridan’s ass was unable
to decide because the alternatives before it were equal in force.
Inasmuch as human beings do not starve in the midst of plenty,
it must be the case that they can act arbitrarily, without refer-
ence to reasons, and therefore freely.

What was the response of the philosophers to the story?
Spinoza ungraciously suggested that anyone who took Buri-
dan’s ass seriously was an ass himself. But we know that Spi-
noza, who was a disciple of Descartes, lacked a due apprecia-
tion of the animal kingdom. 4 Leibnitz replied that the story is
not true to fact, for no two alternatives can ever be completely
similar. Did Leibnitz mean to imply that the two bags of oats
were not equidistant from the ass’s center of gravity? If so,
he failed to show a proper regard for the perfect spatial pattern
— that unity of place which is one of the glories of this drama.
But it is time that we considered the doctrine of indeterminism
apart from any symbolism.

There are several variants of indeterminism of which per-
haps the best known is the one set forth by William James in
his essay called “The Dilemma of Determinism.” All the vari-
ants agree in the view that the effect is independent of the
supposed cause or causes, and they ensure that given the cause,
whether as located in the person acting or in the entire uni-
verse, the direction chosen is not necessary. Indeterminism at-
tempts to make a place for human freedom by introducing
contingency, or chance, into the order of things. The past cir-
cumscribes choice but does not determine it. Bergson (who
for our purposes may be taken as an indeterminist) describes
nature as a creative process issuing into novelty, such that the
future cannot be predicted from the past. Bergson eschews final-
ism as well as mechanism, maintaining that a pull from ahead
would be no less determining than a push from behind. Never-
theless, he holds that his view of process can be made com-
patible with the scientific account which holds that nature is
ordered by the law of cause and effect, provided a distinction

4 Ethics , Part IV, Prop. XXXVII, n. 1.

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603

is made between things in the making and things as made.
Process., while it is transpiring is creative; but considered ex
post facto can be construed deterministically. Whereas Berg-
son does not think that there is a fundamental difference be-
tween human action and the behavior of nature at large in this
respect (though this point is not wholly clear), other thinkers
limit indeterminism to the sphere of human choice and construe
indeterminism, more specifically, as self-creation, in the sense
that the self is both cause and effect. Against this view — and
to some extent against Bergson’s — two points may be made.

a. Although as will be seen from the later paragraphs, I
have a good deal of sympathy with this view, I disapprove of
the way it is formulated. How can an entity cause itself? If,
on the one hand, it is there as a cause, it already exists, and
therefore is not a cause of its existence. If, on the other, it is
a cause, it does not exist; but how can what is not be a cause?
Now, if the view under criticism be modified or amplified to
mean not that the self is creative of itself, but that the self
causes acts which are novel, such that they are not contained in
the cause, new objections arise. It is not part of determinism
to assert that the effect is contained in its cause; a proposition
asserting a relation of cause to effect probably is a synthetic
proposition. In short, the modification proposed would in no
way help to distinguish the doctrine of self-creation from that
of determinism.

b. It is hard to see how the view which distinguishes be-
tween the account of things ex post facto and that of things in
the making can stand. We are told that, once having come
about, events can be described as determined; but considered
in the making, events are not determined. We are asked to
believe, in other words, that two contradictory accounts of the
same process are both true, if the process is described at dif-
ferent times. Surely, if a proposition is true of an event S at
moment T x , it is also true of S at T 2 .

c. The main criticism of indeterminism is that it fails to
fulfill its professed aim, which is to validate practical judg-
ments. Take the judgment that A is responsible for his action
Y. In order to establish real possibility, indeterminism destroys

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604

the bond between the agent and the act 5 the act just happens;
yet what we want is the ability to say, “He did it.” Undeter-
mined conduct is irresponsible conduct; we are given arbitrari-
ness when we would have causal activity. Indeterminism solves
the problem so drastically that human agency is denied. If the
act is unconnected with the agent, it is impossible to praise or
blame him for his act. Acts are events floating in a vacuum.
As Hume pointed out, the object of anger is a person; when
wicked action excites anger, it is so only by its relation to the
person.

But according to the doctrine of . . . chance, this connection is
reduced to nothing. . . . The action itself may be blamable ; it
may be contrary to all the rules of morality and religion; but the
person is not responsible for it. . . . According to the hypothesis of
liberty, therefore, a man is as pure and untainted, after having com-
mitted the most horrid crimes, as at the first moment of his birth, nor
is his character any way concerned in his action, . . . and the wick-
edness of one can never be used as a proof of the depravity of the
other . 5

The hypothesis of chance is altogether too negative to be
useful; it denies causation of the act by the agent and thus
rejects responsibility as well. Hume concludes that “it is only
upon the principles of necessity that a person acquires any
merit or demerit from his actions, however the common opinion
may incline to the contrary.” 6

But we have seen that the way back to determinism would
not be a way out. While indeterminism would lead to a denial
of human responsibility, determinism excludes real possibility.
There is a real dilemma: to assert determinism is to deny free-
dom; to assert its opposite is to deny freedom too. It may well
be the case — as Kant suggested — that freedom is a fact which
we must assert but which we cannot understand — that, in other
words, freedom is a mystery. What I hope chiefly to prove
to the reader of this essay is the extreme complexity of this
problem and the inadequacy of the traditional theories. And it

5 Treatise, Part III, sec. II.

6 Treatise , Part III, sec. II.

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60S

may be that no solution can be found. The easiest way out
would be to deny that the problem exists — to throw the notion
of freedom out of the window and to conclude, with Spinoza,
that practical judgments are inadequate and confused. We have
already considered this alternative and ruled it out. Shall we
then say that there is no rational formula which could ade-
quately express the experience of choice and validate practical
judgments? I, for one, would not rule out the notion of mys-
tery, merely on principle. It is possible that there are data of
experience which elude conceptual formulation. But before
committing ourselves to such a view, it would seem wise to
explore the situation further in the hope of discovering a for-
mula which will prove satisfactory. What then are the factors
which any definition of freedom should take into account?

We should be able to say that human beings are responsible
for their actions 5 this being so, the theory of chance is ruled
out. But if man is a cause from which the act necessarily fol-
lows, real possibility is excluded. Therefore, the theory of cau-
sality as strict implication is ruled out. It is necessary to have
a cause for the act, but it should not be in fact necessary that
the cause eventuate in the particular effect. The trouble with
determinism is that, according to the theory, the cause is in
some sense determined by the effect. Putting the matter crudely,
the cause has to have its effect 5 or, putting it formally, the
cause entails its effect. To account for practical beliefs, we must
have recourse to a type of cause from which the effect does not
follow necessarily. We therefore propose to resurrect the
notion of fower which Hume had buried.

Y 1 1

Power . The current theory of causality 7 is that of a functional
relation between entities or events, such that if it be a fact that
A has caused Y, it is true that in all cases A implies Y. Our
notion of power differs from the above in the following respects:

a. Causality is an individual relation between individual en-

7 Russell, of. cit. 9 pp. 180-208.

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606

tities . 8 Generality of the relation would be an additional infer-
ence, whenever the facts justify it; but generality is not a
component of power.

b. Power means more than the mere fact that two events,
contiguous or not, succeed each other. Power is causal efficacy ,
activity, production. The stone’s impact on the window is the
cause of the window’s breaking, in the sense that the stone
acted on the window and broke it. Hume notwithstanding, I
do observe (subject to the usual reservations concerning the
chances of error in any observation) that A pushed Y, or that
my belief in proposition C led me to believe proposition D.
The cause operates and produces the effect.

c . Power is a causal relation whereby the cause does not
entail the effect which, in fact, it has caused; given the cause,
a number of effects are possible. I exercise power over my con-
duct in the sense that I am free to act in any number of ways,
or even not to act at all; this particular action which I have
chosen is not necessary to me. We must note that point c is
additional to point a . For, supposing we described the indi-
vidual cause in all of its generic and all of its specific and
unique characteristics, and supposing we described the effect
in the same fashion, it would still be open to anyone to main-
tain that the uniquely determined cause entails the uniquely
determined effect. And indeed so long as we are in the realm
of essence, generic or specific, so long rather as we define the
individual through its essence, we are committed to the doc-
trine of entailment. Power, then, is causality without entail-
ment, and is exercised by an individual directly, not in terms
of his essence.

But does causality without entailment make sense? Or if it
does, how does it differ from the notion of chance set forth
by the proponents of indeterminism? If the particular effect be
not necessary, given the cause, then the event is a chance re-
sult. In other words, may not the doctrine of power be the
doctrine of indeterminism under another name? Let us see.

8 See C. Ducasse for a similar view, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXIII
(1926), pp. 57-68. Ducasse, however, maintains that the cause in all cases is
an event or a change.

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607

Power is production; while the cause need not have produced
the effect, it did in fact produce it. Power is just this abil-
ity to produce a given effect without having to do so. The con-
crete fact of experience is complex: it involves both activity
and genuine possibility. Traditional theories abstract from this
concrete fact, indeterminism omitting the first ingredient, and
determinism the second. Let us now consider what the doctrine
of power means in terms of human experience.

Supposing that I have failed to perform the task which was
assigned to me, you, then, blame me for my failure, urging
that the failure was the outcome of a free choice. No — I reply
— I failed to do the job because I am lazy; laziness is my na-
ture. You insist, thereupon (following Aristotle), that laziness
is a habit which I have formed through the kind of life I have
led, the kind of choices I have freely made. Granted — I retort;
but why did I behave in the way which resulted in my becom-
ing lazy? It is because I am self-indulgent by nature.

The argument forces us to the view that my action was deter-
mined by my nature. What the argument really brings out
is that unless we differentiate the self from its nature, there is
no alternative to a deterministic account of human action. If
the self is constituted by its nature, if substance be essence,
then human choice is determined. Conversely, the self is free
in the sense that it is not constituted by its nature. We must
therefore eliminate Aristotle’s formal cause. Aristotle defines
substance as essence; we reject the definition. Essence is some-
thing that comes to be or passes away in a substance; I make
or become my essence. Thus, the self is not necessarily deter-
minate. I failed to perform my task because it is my nature
to be lazy or self-indulgent; yes, but I am responsible for my
nature no less than for my acts. Now, entailment is a relation
among essences; the self is a cause that does not entail its acts >
because the self is not an essence — because the self causes its
essence . And that is power: the ability of the self to modify
its nature. Thus, we have returned by another route to the
conclusions of section V. The self is other than its nature,
whether rational or appetitive; and the decision of the self is
ultimately the decision to be or not to be rational. We are free

FREEDOM

608

with reference to our respective natures. It is true that for the
most part we act from our natures ; but there are crises, emer-
gencies, moments of great resolution, when a man stands apart
from his character, criticizes it, and modifies his values. Lazi-
ness, self-indulgence, perseverance, temperateness — all such at-
titudes are freely chosen even from infancy.

To recapitulate: the notion of power involves the following
elements. As to the cause: (a) The cause need not be an event;
it may be a particular entity — namely, the self, (b) The cause
is a substance in the sense of something which is distinct from
its properties. As to the effect: (c) The self determines not
only its acts but its properties as well; in short, its essence.
As to the causal relation : (d) Power is a particular relation
between an individual cause and an individual effect, (e) The
cause does not entail the effect but produces it. Thus power
is causality without generality and without entailment; it is
exercised by a cause which is neither a change, since it is a
substance underlying the change; nor a determinate form,
since the substance determines its form.

A cause is a substance; the causal relation is not between
essence and essence, and therefore may not be described for-
mally. It is a relation between substance and substance directly.
Self-causation is the relation by which a substance determines its
own essence. In sum, causation is an actual concrete operation,
not a formal or logical relation.

VIII

Theoretical and Practical Reason. We have maintained that
human beings are free; we have not said, however, that there
is freedom in nature or in God. It is not the intention of this
essay to extend the notion of power outside the province of
human choice. Now, assuming that we have solved the dilemma
of determinism versus indeterminism, we still have on our hands
the dilemma arising from the conflict between the beliefs of
practical reason and those of theoretical reason. But before we
take up this point, are we not confronted by a difficulty arising
from the facts of observation itself? For instance, Hume con-

RAPHAEL DEMOS 609

trasts the results of introspection with those of general observa-
tion as follows:

We may imagine we feel a liberty within ourselves, but a spec-
tator can commonly infer our actions from our motives and charac-
ter; and even when he cannot, he concludes in general that he
might, were he perfectly acquainted with every circumstance of our
situation and temper, and the most secret springs of our complexion
and disposition. 9

We have in the above sentence an argument from experi-
ence, and an argument from a presumption. We will begin with
the first of the two.

We have definite expectations about the conduct of our
fellow-men, which are in fact confirmed. How could society
operate as a going concern, unless human conduct were regu-
lar and predictable? The very fact that we punish and reward
people indicates that their conduct and their character are de~
terminately effects of causes. Now, we may admit that people
have stable characters, w r hich enable the spectator to predict
their conduct ; and that actions are controllable by external
factors; we may admit all this, I say, without abandoning the
view that human beings are free. A punishment operates on
an individual so as to modify his conduct, because the indi-
vidual chooses to avoid pain in the future, rather than persist
in the same course of conduct and suffer unpleasant conse-
quences. Also, the spectator is able to predict my conduct from
a character which I have freely adopted. Characters are always
habits. Freedom of choice does not imply, as Bergson thinks
it does, novelty of action from moment to moment. It may
still be argued, however, that under the hypothesis in ques-
tion, it is open to the seif to alter its character, and then expec-
tations would be falsified. Well, are thev not sometimes falsi-
fied?

Should we now be told that this view is untenable because
all events are necessary, given the conditions, it will be obvious
that the argument has shifted from the ground of observa-
tion to that of postulation. We are faced with the alleged pre-

9 Op. cit Part III, see. II.

FREEDOM

610

sumption of theoretical reason that— to repeat Hume’s phrase
— “were he [the spectator] acquainted with every circumstance
of our situation and temper, and the most secret springs of
our complexion and disposition” he would be able to infer our
actions. That this is a presumption cannot be gainsaid; it is
the presumption that every event is necessarily determined by
reference to a cause. What does this mean? That given the
cause, no other effect was possible. But inasmuch as the rela-
tion of cause to effect is synthetic, as the effect is not ana-
lytically contained in the cause, how can anyone assert that no
other effect was possible? The scientist simply observes that
event Y has been produced by cause A; and if, further, he ob-
serves a similar connection at other times, he proceeds to infer
that in all cases where A occurs, Y will (probably) occur. In
short, all that the scientist can validly assert is predictability,
but not necessity.

Now, there is no incompatibility between our definition of
freedom and the conception of the predictability of events,
provided that we make certain qualifications of the latter. Sci-
entific laws, we will say, express statistical averages, enabling
us to infer concerning a given individual that, in view of his
character, he will probably behave in a certain way. The laws
concerning human conduct will roughly take the following
form: men of such and such a description, situated in such and
such circumstances, can be safely expected to act in such and
such a way. Now, although man’s passions, reasons, and cir-
cumstances do not necessitate his actions, they do in fact incite
the self to move in a particular direction. And human beings
do, on the average, choose the path indicated by ideals or pas-
sions. In sum, the beliefs of practical reason can be harmonized
with the presumptions of theoretical reason provided ( a ) the
latter are stated so as to involve probable prediction, and {¥)
provided the former are not stated so as to exclude statistical
uniformity. If, finally, we are asked, What does it mean to
say that acts are free, so far as experience is concerned, when
we have agreed that they are predictable? we would reply
that the proposition that human conduct is free has meaning
in relation to our introspective experience of choice.

RAPHAEL DEMOS

6 1 1

IX

No philosophy is sound which takes into account only one
portion of our primitive beliefs as they are embodied in com-
mon sense; no philosophy is adequate which — because it has
already confined itself to one set of particular rules— excludes
large portions of experience. There is a tendency at any epoch,
for one or another group of primitive beliefs to take the upper
hand and legislate on all the others. Philosophy is the eternal
watchdog guarding man against the hubris of the intellect.
When the mind is confronted with a variety of empirical data,
not all equally amenable to the same set of rules, it is easy
enough to develop a consistent theory by ignoring those ele-
ments which don’t fit, or by defining them as illusory. It is
the method of explaining by explaining away; and it is the
line of least resistance. Philosophy is the unprejudiced insight
into crude fact — fact unpolished by theory, fact not as yet
brought under a rule. Thus philosophy does not so much build
upon the various intellectual disciplines; rather, it undoes their
work. Philosophy is the return to pure experience, away from
the constructions of it engendered by the application of rules
to immediacy. In our age, the rules and conceptual scheme of
science have been so effective that they have tended to harden
into dogmas. We are apt to regard without question as unreal
any experience which does not conform to the conceptual
framework of science; and as invalid all rules different from
its own. Yet the experience of choice is there demanding
recognition — to be naturalized rather than deported; and the
judgments of practical reason are bound up with our life in ail
its phases, not to be brushed aside simply because they appear
to be inconsistent with the judgments of theoretical reason. Our
practical beliefs enter into our practice; and a philosophy which
refuses to impute validity to them lays itself open to the charge
of insincerity.

Henri Bergson

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, College de France

FREEDOM AND OBLIGATION

T HE remembrance of forbidden fruit is the earliest
thing in the memory of each of us, as it is in that of
mankind. We should notice this, were not this recol-
lection overlaid by others which we are more inclined to dwell
upon. What a childhood we should have had if only we had
been left to do as we pleased! We should have flitted from
pleasure to pleasure. But all of a sudden an obstacle arose,
neither visible nor tangible: a prohibition. Why did we obey?
The question hardly occurred to us. We had formed the habit
of deferring to our parents and teachers. All the same we knew
very well that it was because they were our parents, because
they were our teachers. Therefore, in our eyes, their authority
came less from themselves than from their status in relation
to us. They occupied a certain station 5 that was the source of
the command which, had it issued from some other quarter,
would not have possessed the same weight. In other words,
parents and teachers seemed to act by proxy. We did not fully
realize this, but behind our parents and our teachers we had
an inkling of some enormous, or rather some shadowy, thing
that exerted pressure on us through them. Later we would
say it was society. And speculating upon it, we should com-
pare it to an organism whose cells, united by imperceptible
links, fall into their respective places in a highly developed
hierarchy, and for the greatest good of the whole naturally
submit to a discipline that may demand the sacrifice of the

612

HENRI BERGSON

613

part. This, however, can only be a comparison, for an organism
subject to inexorable laws is one thing, and a society composed
of free wills another. But once these wills are organized, they
assume the guise of an organism; and in this more or less arti-
ficial organism habit plays the same role as necessity in the
works of nature. From this first standpoint, social life appears
to us a system of more or less deeply rooted habits, correspond-
ing to the needs of the community. Some of them are habits
of command, most of them are habits of obedience, whether
we obey a person commanding by virtue of a mandate from
society, or whether from society itself, vaguely perceived or
felt, there emanates an impersonal imperative. Each of these
habits of obedience exerts a pressure on our will. We can evade
it, but then we are attracted towards it, drawn back to it, like
a pendulum which has swung away from the vertical. A cer-
tain order of things has been upset, it must be restored. In a
word, as with all habits, we feel a sense of obligation.

But in this case the obligation is immeasurably stronger.
When a certain magnitude is so much greater than another
that the latter is negligible in comparison, mathematicians say
that it belongs to another order. So it is with social obligation.
The pressure of it, compared to that of other habits, is such
that the difference in degree amounts to a difference in kind.
It should be noted that all habits of this nature lend one an-
other mutual support. Although we may not speculate on their
essence and on their origin, we feel that they are interrelated,
being demanded of us by our immediate surroundings, or by
the surroundings of those surroundings, and so on to the utter-
most limit, which would be society. Each one corresponds,
directly or indirectly, to a social necessity; and so they all hang
together, they form a solid block. Many of them would be
trivial obligations if they appeared singly. But they are an
integral part of obligation in general, and this whole, which
is what it is owing to the contributions of its parts, in its turn
confers upon each one the undivided authority of the totality.
Thus the sum total comes to the aid of each of its parts, and
the general sentence “do what duty bids” triumphs over the
hesitations we might feel in the presence of a single duty. As

FREEDOM

614

a matter of fact, we do not explicitly think of a mass of partial
duties added together and constituting a single total obligation.
Perhaps there is really not an aggregation of parts. The
strength which one obligation derives from all the others is
rather to be compared to the breath of life drawn, complete
and indivisible, by each of the cells from the depths of the
organism of which it is an element. Society, present within
each of its members, has claims which, whether great or small,
each express the sum-total of its vitality. But let us again
repeat that this is only a comparison. A human community
is a collectivity of free beings. The obligations which it lays
down, and which enable it to subsist, introduce into it a regu-
larity which has merely some analogy to the inflexible order of
the phenomena of life.

And yet everything conspires to make us believe that this
regularity is comparable with that of nature. I do not allude
merely to the unanimity of mankind in praising certain acts
and blaming others. I mean that, even in those cases where
moral precepts implied in judgments of values are not ob-
served, we contrive that they should appear so. Just as we do
not notice disease when walking along the street, so we do
not gauge the degree of possible immorality behind the ex-
terior which humanity presents to the world. It would take a
good deal of time to become a misanthrope if we confined our-
selves to the observation of others. It is when we detect our
own weaknesses that we come to pity or despise mankind. The
human nature from which we then turn away is the human
nature we have discovered in the depths of our own being. The
evil is so well screened, the secret so universally kept, that in
this case each individual is the dupe of all: however severely
we may profess to judge other men, at bottom we think them
better than ourselves. On this happy illusion much of our social
life is grounded.

It is natural that society should do everything to encourage
this idea. The laws which it promulgates and which maintain
the social order resemble, moreover, in certain aspects, the
laws of nature. I admit that the difference is a radical one in
the eyes of the philosopher. To him the law which enunciates

HENRI BERGSON

615

facts is one thing, the law which commands, another. It is pos-
sible to evade the latter 5 here we have obligation, not neces-
sity, The former is, on the contrary, unescapable, for if any
fact diverged from it we should be wrong in having assumed
it to be a law, there would exist another one, the true one,
formulated in such a way as to express everything we observe
and to which the recalcitrant fact -would then conform like the
rest. True enough ; but to the majority of people the distinc-
tion is far from being so clear. A law, be it physical, social,
or moral — every law — is in their eyes a command. There is
a certain order of nature which finds expression in laws: the
facts are presumed to “obey” these laws so as to conform with
that order. The scientist himself can hardly help believing
that the law “governs” facts and consequently is prior to them,
like the Platonic Idea on which all things had to model them-
selves, The higher he rises in the scale of generalizations the
more he tends, willy-nilly, to endow the law with this impera-
tive character; it requires a very real struggle against our own
prepossessions to imagine the principles of mechanics otherwise
than as inscribed from all eternity on the transcendent tables
that modern science has apparently fetched down from another
Sinai. But if physical law tends to assume in our imagination
the form of a command when it attains to a certain degree of
generality, in its turn an imperative which applies to everybody
appears to us somewhat like a law of nature. The two ideas,
coming against each other in our minds, effect an exchange.
The law borrows from the command its prerogative of com-
pulsion; the command receives from the law its inevitability.
Thus a breach of the social order assumes an antinatural char-
acter; even when frequently repeated, it strikes us as an ex-
ception, being to society what a freak creation is to nature.

And suppose we discern behind the social imperative a reli-
gious command? No matter the relation between the two
terms: whether religion be interpreted in one way or another,
whether it be social in essence or by accident, one thing is cer-
tain, that it has always played a social role. This part, indeed,
is a complex one: it varies with time and place; but in societies
such as our own the first effect of religion is to sustain and

FREEDOM

6 1 6

reinforce the claims of society. It may go much further. It goes
at least thus far. Society institutes punishments which may
strike the innocent and spare the guilty 3 its rewards are few
and far between 3 it takes broad views and is easily satisfied;
what human scales could weigh, as they should be weighed,
rewards and punishments? But, just as the Platonic Ideas reveal
to us, in its perfection and fullness, that reality which we see
only in crude imitations, so religion admits us to a city whose
most prominent features are here and there roughly typified
by our institutions, our laws, and our customs. Here below,
order is merely approximate, being more or less artificially
obtained by man 3 above, it is perfect and self-creative. Reli-
gion therefore, in our eyes, succeeds in filling in the gap, al-
ready narrowed by our habitual way of looking at things, be-
tween a command of society and a law of nature.

We are thus being perpetually brought back to the same
comparison, defective though it be in many ways, yet appro-
priate enough to the point with which we are dealing. The
members of a civic community hold together like the cells
of an organism. Habit, served by intelligence and imagination,
introduces among them a discipline resembling, in the interde-
pendence it establishes between separate individuals, the unity
of an organism of anastomotic cells.

Everything, yet again, conspires to make social order an imi-
tation of the order observed in nature. It is evident that each of
us, thinking of himself alone, feels at liberty to follow his
bent, his desire, or his fancy, and not consider his fellow-men.
But this inclination has no sooner taken shape than it comes
up against a force composed of the accumulation of all social
forces 3 unlike individual motives, each pulling its own way,
this force would result in an order not without analogy to that
of natural phenomena. The component cell of an organism, on
becoming momentarily conscious, would barely have outlived
the wish to emancipate itself when it would be recaptured by
necessity. An individual forming part of a community may
bend or even break a necessity of the same kind, which to some
extent he has helped to create, but to which, still more, he has
to yield 3 the sense of this necessity, together with the con-

HENRI BERGSON

617

sciousness of being able to evade it, is none the less what he
calls an obligation. From this point of view, and taken in its
most usual meaning, obligation is to necessity what habit is
to nature.

It does not come then exactly from without. Each of us be-
longs as much to society as to himself. While his conscious-
ness, delving downwards, reveals to him, the deeper he goes,
an ever more original personality, incommensurable with the
others and indeed undefinable in words, on the surface of life
we are in continuous contact with other men whom we resem-
ble, and united to them by a discipline which creates between
them and us a relation of interdependence. Has the self no
other means of clinging to something solid than by taking up
its position in that part of us which is socialized? That would
be so if there were no other way of escape from a life of im-
pulse, caprice, and regret. But in our innermost selves, if we
know how to look for it, we may perhaps discover another sort
of equilibrium, still more desirable than the one on the surface.
Certain aquatic plants as they rise to the surface are ceaselessly
jostled by the current: their leaves, meeting above the water,
interlace, thus imparting to them stability above. But still more
stable are the roots, which, firmly planted in the earth, support
them from below. However, wq shall not dwell for the present
on the effort to delve down to the depths of our being. If pos-
sible at all, it is exceptional 5 and it is on the surface, at the
point where it inserts itself into the close-woven tissue of other
exteriorized personalities, that our ego generally finds its point
of attachment j its solidity lies in this solidarity. But, at the
point where it is attached, it is itself socialized. Obligation,
which we look upon as a bond between men, first binds us to
ourselves.

It would therefore be a mistake to reproach a purely social
morality with neglecting individual duties. Even if w r e were
only in theory under a state of obligation towards other men,
we should be so in fact towards ourselves, since social solidarity
exists only in so far as a social ego is superadded, in each of
us, to the individual self. To cultivate this social ego is the
essence of our obligation to society. Were there not some

FREEDOM

6 1 8

part of society in us, it would have no hold on us; and we
scarcely need seek it out, we are self-sufficient, if we find it
present within us. Its presence is more or less marked in dif-
ferent men; but no one could cut himself off from it com-
pletely- Nor would he wish to do so, for he is perfectly aware
that the greater part of his strength comes from this source,
and that he owes to the ever recurring demands of social life
that unbroken tension of energy, that steadiness of aim in
effort, which ensures the greatest return for his activity. But
he could not do so, even if he wished to, because his memory
and his imagination live on what society has implanted in them,
because the soul of society is inherent in the language he speaks,
and because even if there is no one present, even if he is
merely thinking, he is still talking to himself. Vainly do we
try to imagine an individual cut off from all social life. Even
materially, Robinson Crusoe on his island remains in contact
with other men, for the manufactured objects he saved from
the wreck, and without which he could not get along, keep
him within the bounds of civilization, and consequently within
those of society. But a moral contact is still more necessary to
him, for he would be soon discouraged if he had nothing else
to cope with his incessant difficulties except an individual
strength of which he knows the limitations. He draws en-
ergy from the society to which he remains attached in spirit;
he may not perceive it, still it is there, watching him; if the
individual ego maintains alive and present the social ego, he
will effect, even in isolation, what he would with the encour-
agement and even the support of the whole of society. Those
whom circumstances condemn for a time to solitude, and who
cannot find within themselves the resources of a deep inner
life, know the penalty of “giving way,” that is to say, of not
stabilizing the individual ego at the level prescribed by the
social ego. They will therefore be careful to maintain the lat-
ter, so that it shall not relax for one moment its strictness
towards the former. If necessary, they will seek for some ma-
terial or artificial support for it. You remember Kipling’s For-
est Officer, alone in his bungalow in the heart of the Indian

HENRI BERGSON 619

rukh? He dresses every evening for dinner, so as to preserve
his self-respect in his isolation . 1

We shall not go so far as to say that this social ego is Adam
Smith’s “impartial spectator,” or that it must necessarily be
identified with moral conscience, or that we feel pleased or
displeased with ourselves according as it is favorably or un-
favorably affected. We shall discover deeper sources for our
moral feelings. Language here groups under one name very
different things. What is there in common between the remorse
of a murderer and that racking, haunting pain, also a remorse,
which we may feel at having wounded someone’s pride or been
unjust to a child? To betray the confidence of an innocent soul
opening out to life is one of the most heinous offenses for a cer-
tain type of conscience, which is apparently lacking in a sense
of proportion, precisely because it does not borrow from society
its standards, its gauges, its system of measurement. This type
of conscience is not the one that is most often at work. At any
rate it is more or less sensitive in different people. Generally
the verdict of conscience is the verdict which would be given
by the social self.

And also, generally speaking, moral distress is a throwing
out of gear of the relations between the social and the indi-
vidual self. Analyze the feeling of remorse in the soul of a
desperate criminal. You might mistake it at first for the dread
of punishment, and indeed you find most minute precautions,
perpetually supplemented and renewed, to conceal the crime
and avoid being found out; at every moment comes the awful
thought that some detail has been overlooked and that the
authorities will get hold of the telltale clue. But look closer:
what the fellow wants is not so much to evade punishment as
to wipe out the past, to arrange things just as though the crime
had never been committed at all. When nobody knows that a
thing exists, it is almost as if it were nonexistent. Thus it is the
crime itself that the criminal wants to erase, by suppressing
any knowledge of it that might come to the human ken. But
his own knowledge persists, and note how it drives him more
and more out of that society within which he hoped to remain

1 “In the Rukh/ 5 in Many Inventions . V : - :

FREEDOM

620

by obliterating the traces of his crime. For the same esteem for
the man he was is still shown to the man he is no longer $ there-
fore society is not addressing him ; it is speaking to someone
else. He, knowing what he is, feels more isolated among his
fellow-men than he would on a desert island; for in his soli-
tude he would carry with him, enveloping him and supporting
him, the image of society; but now he is cut off from the image
as well as the thing. He could reinstate himself in society by
confessing his crime: he would then be treated according to
his deserts, but society would then be speaking to his real self.
He would resume his collaboration with other men. He would
be punished by them, but, having made himself one of them,
he would be in a small degree the author of his own condemna-
tion; and a part of himself, the best part, would thus escape
the penalty. Such is the force which will drive a criminal to
give himself up. Sometimes without going so far he will con-
fess to a friend, or to any decent fellow. By thus putting him-
self right, if not in the eyes of all, at least in somebody’s eyes,
he reattaches himself to society at a single point, by a thread;
even if he does not reinstate himself in it, at least he is near it,
close to it; he no longer remains alienated from it; in any case
he is no longer in complete rupture with it, nor with that
element of it which is part of himself.

It takes this violent break to reveal clearly the nexus of the
individual to society. In the ordinary way we conform to our
obligations rather than think of them. If we had every time
to evoke the idea, enunciate the formula, it would be much
more tiring to do our duty. But habit is enough, and in most
cases we have only to leave well enough alone in order to ac-
cord to society what it expects from us. Moreover, society has
made matters very much easier for us by interpolating inter-
mediaries between itself and us: we have a family; we follow'
a trade or a profession; we belong to our parish, to our dis-
trict, to our county; and, in cases v r here the insertion of the
group into society is complete, we may content ourselves, if
need be, with fulfilling our obligations towards the group and
so paying our debts to society. Society occupies the circumfer-
ence; the individual is at the center; from the center to the

HENRI BERGSON

621

circumference are arranged, like so many ever widening con-
centric circles, the various groups to which the individual be-
longs. From the circumference to the center, as the circles grow
smaller, obligations are added to obligations, and the individual
ends by finding himself confronted with all of them together.
Thus obligation increases as it advances; but, if it is more com-
plicated, it is less abstract, and the more easily accepted. When
it has become fully concrete, it coincides with a tendency, so
habitual that we find it natural, to play in society the part which
our station assigns to us. So long as we yield to this tendency,
we scarcely feel it. It assumes a peremptory aspect, like all
deep-seated habits, only if we depart from it.

It is society that draws up for the individual the program
of his daily routine. It is impossible to live a family life, follow
a profession, attend to the thousand and one cares of the day,
do one’s shopping, go for a stroll, or even stay at home, with-
out obeying rules and submitting to obligations. Every instant
we have to choose, and we naturally decide on what is in keep-
ing with the rule. We are hardly conscious of this; there is no
effort. A road has been marked out by society; it lies open be-
fore us, and we follow it; it would take more initiative to cut
across country. Duty, in this sense, is almost always done auto-
matically; and obedience to duty, if we restrict ourselves to
the most usual case, might be defined as a form of nonexertion,
passive acquiescence. How comes it, then, that on the contrary
this obedience appears as a state of strain, and duty itself as
something harsh and unbending? Obviously because there oc-
cur cases where obedience implies an overcoming of self. These
cases are exceptions; but we notice them because they are ac-
companied by acute consciousness, as happens with all forms
of hesitation — in fact consciousness is this hesitation itself; for
an action which is started automatically passes almost unper-
ceived. Thus, owing to the interdependence of our duties, and
because the obligation as a whole is immanent in each of its
parts, all duties are tinged with the hue taken on exceptionally
by one or the other of them. From the practical point of view
this presents no inconvenience, there are even certain advan-
tages in looking at things in this way. For, however naturally

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we do our duty, we may meet with resistance within ourselves 5
it is wise to expect it and not take for granted that it is easy
to remain a good husband, a decent citizen, a conscientious
worker, in a word an honest fellow. Besides, there is a consid-
erable amount of truth in this opinion 5 for if it is relatively
easy to keep within the social order, yet we have had to enroll
in it, and this enrollment demands an effort. The natural dis-
obedience of the child, the necessity of education, are proof of
this. It is but just to credit the individual with the consent
virtually given to the totality of his obligations, even if he
no longer needs to take counsel with himself on each one of
them. The rider need only allow himself to be borne along;
still he has had to get into the saddle. So it is with the indi-
vidual in relation to society. In one sense it would be untrue,
and in every sense it would be dangerous, to say that duty
can be done automatically. Let us then set up as a practical
maxim that obedience to duty means resistance to self.

But a maxim is one thing, an explanation another. When,
in order to define obligation, its essence and its origin, we lay
down that obedience is primarily a struggle with self, a state
of tension or contraction, we make a psychological error which
has vitiated many theories of ethics. Thus artificial difficulties
have arisen, problems which set philosophers at variance and
which will be found to vanish when we analyze the terms in
which they are expressed. Obligation is in no sense a unique
fact, incommensurate with others, looming above them like a
mysterious apparition. If a considerable number of philoso-
phers, especially those who follow Kant, have taken this view,
it is because they have confused the sense of obligation, a tran-
quil state akin to inclination, with the violent effort we now
and again exert on ourselves to break down a possible obstacle
to obligation.

After an attack of rheumatism, we may feel some discom-
fort and even pain in moving our muscles and joints. It is the
general sensation of a resistance set up by all our organs to-
gether. Little by little it decreases and ends by being lost in
the consciousness we have of our movements when we are well.
Now, we are at liberty to fancy that it is still there, in an in-

HENRI BERGSON

623

cipient, or rather a subsiding, condition, that it is only on the
lookout for a chance to become more acute 5 we must indeed
expect attacks of rheumatism if we are rheumatic. Yet what
should we say of a philosopher who saw in our habitual sensa-
tions, when moving our arms and legs, a mere diminution of
pain, and who then defined our motor faculty as an effort to
resist rheumatic discomfort? To begin with, he would thus be
giving up the attempt to account for motor habits, since each
of these implies a particular combination of movements, and
can be explained only by that combination. The general fac-
ulty of walking, running, moving the body, is but an aggrega-
tion of these elementary habits, each of them .finding its own
explanation in the special movements it involves. But having
only considered the faculty as a whole, and having then defined
it as a force opposed to a resistance, it is natural enough to set
up rheumatism beside it as an independent entity. It would
seem as though some such error had been made by many of
those who have speculated on obligation. We have any num-
ber of particular obligations, each calling for a separate ex-
planation. It is natural, or, more strictly speaking, it is a mat-
ter of habit to obey them all. Suppose that exceptionally we
deviate from one of them, there would be resistance ; if we
resist this resistance, a state of tension or contraction is likely
to result. It is this rigidity which we objectify when we attrib-
ute so stern an aspect to duty.

It is also what the philosophers have in mind, when they
see fit to resolve obligation into rational elements. In order
to resist resistance, to keep to the right paths, when desire,
passion, or interest tempt us aside, we must necessarily give
ourselves reasons. Even if we have opposed the unlawful desire
by another, the latter, conjured up by the will, could arise only
at the call of an idea. In a word, an intelligent being generally
exerts his influence on himself through the medium of intelli-
gence. But from the fact that we get back to obligation by
rational ways it does not follow that obligation was of a rational
order. Let us say that a tendency, natural or acquired, is one
things another thing the necessarily rational method which a
reasonable being w r iil use to restore to it its force and to combat

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624

what is opposing it. In the latter case the tendency which has
been obscured may reappear ; and then everything doubtless
happens as though we had succeeded by this method in re-
establishing the tendency anew. In reality we have merely
swept aside something that hampered or checked it. It comes
to the same thing, I grant you, in practice: explain the fact
in one way or another, the fact is there, we have achieved
success. And in order to succeed it is perhaps better to imagine
that things did happen in the former way. But to state that
this is actually the case would be to vitiate the whole theory
of obligation. Has not this been the case with most philoso-
phers?

Let there be no misunderstanding. Even if we confine our-
selves to a certain aspect of morality, as we have done up to
now, we shall find many different attitudes towards duty. They
line the intervening space between the extremes of two atti-
tudes, or rather two habits: that of moving so naturally along
the ways laid down by society as barely to notice them; or on
the contrary hesitating and deliberating on which way to take,
how far to go, the distances out and back we shall have to cover
if we try several paths one after another. In the second case
new problems arise with more or less frequency; and even in
those instances where our duty is fully mapped out, we make
all sorts of distinctions in fulfilling it. But, in the first place,
the former attitude is that of the immense majority of men;
it is probably general in backward communities. And, after all,
however much we may reason in each particular case, formu-
late the maxim, enunciate the principle, deduce the conse-
quences, if desire and passion join in the discussion, if tempta-
tion is strong, if we are on the point of falling, if suddenly we
recover ourselves, what was it that pulled us up? A force asserts
itself which we have called the “totality of obligation”: the
concentrated extract, the quintessence of innumerable specific
habits of obedience to the countless particular requirements of
social life. This force is no one particular thing and, if it could
speak (whereas it prefers to act), it would say: “You must
because you must.” Hence the work done by intelligence in
weighing reasons, comparing maxims, going back to first prin-

HENRI BERGSON

625

ciples, was to introduce more logical consistency into a line of
conduct subordinated by its very nature to the claims of so-
ciety; but this social claim was the real root of obligation.
Never, in our hours of temptation, should we sacrifice to the
mere need for logical consistency our interest, our passion,
our vanity. Because in a reasonable being reason does indeed
intervene as a regulator to assure this consistency between oblig-
atory rules or maxims, philosophy has been led to look upon
it as a principle of obligation. We might as well believe that
the flywheel drives the machinery.

Besides, the demands of a society dovetail into one another.
Even the individual whose decent behavior is the least based
on reasoning and, if I may put it so, the most conventional,
introduces a rational order into his conduct by the mere fact
of obeying rules which are logically connected together. I
freely admit that such logic has been late in taking possession
of society. Logical co-ordination is essentially economy. From
a whole it first roughly extracts certain principles and then
excludes everything which is not in accordance with them. Na-
ture, by contrast, is lavish. The closer a community is to nature,
the greater the proportion of unaccountable and inconsistent
rules it lays down. We find in primitive races many prohibi-
tions and prescriptions explicable at most by vague associations
of ideas, by superstition, by automatism. Nor are they without
their use, since the obedience of everyone to laws, even absurd
ones, assures greater cohesion to the community. But in that
case the usefulness of the rule accrues, by a kind of reverse
action, solely from the fact of our submission to It. Prescrip-
tions or prohibitions which are intrinsically useful are those
that are explicitly designed for the preservation or well-being
of society. No doubt they have gradually detached themselves
from the others and survived them. Social demands have
therefore been co-ordinated with each other and subordinated
to principles. But no matter. Logic permeates indeed present-
day communities, and even the man who does not reason out
his conduct will live reasonably if he conforms to these prin-
ciples.

But the essence of obligation is a different thing from a

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requirement of reason. This is all we have tried to suggest.
Our description would, we think, correspond more and more
to reality as one came to deal with less developed communi-
ties and more rudimentary stages of consciousness. It remains
a bare outline so long as we confine ourselves to the normal
conscience, such as is found today in the ordinary decent per-
son. But precisely because we are in this case dealing with a
strange complex of feelings, of ideas and tendencies all inter-
penetrating each other, we shall avoid artificial analyses and
arbitrary syntheses only if we have at hand an outline which
gives the essential. Such is the outline we have attempted to
trace. Conceive obligation as weighing on the will like a habit,
each obligation dragging behind it the accumulated mass of
the others, and utilizing thus for the pressure it is exerting
the weight of the whole: here you have the totality of obliga-
tion for a simple, elementary, moral conscience. That is the
essential 3 that is what obligation could, if necessary, be reduced
to, even in those cases where it attains its highest complexity.

This shows when and in what sense (how slightly Kantian! )
obligation in its elementary state takes the form of a “cate-
gorical imperative,” We should find it very difficult to dis-
cover examples of such an imperative in everyday life. A
military order, which is a command that admits neither rea-
son nor reply, does say in fact: “You must because you must.”
But, though you may give the soldier no reason, he will imagine
one. If we want a pure case of the categorical imperative, w T e
must construct one a priori or at least make an arbitrary ab-
straction of experience. So let us imagine an ant who is stirred
by a gleam of reflection and thereupon judges she has been
wrong to work unremittingly for others. Her inclination to
laziness would indeed endure but a few moments, just as long
as the ray of intelligence. In the last of these moments, when
instinct regaining the mastery would drag her back by sheer
force to her task, intelligence at the point of relapsing into
instinct would say, as its parting word: “You must because
you must.” This “must because you must” would only be the
momentary feeling of awareness of a tug which the ant ex-
periences — the tug which the string, momentarily relaxed,

HENRI BERGSON

627

exerts as it drags her back. The same command would ring
in the ear of a sleepwalker on the point of waking, or even
actually beginning to wake, from the dream he is enacting; if
he lapsed back at once into a hypnotic state, a categorical im-
perative would express in words, on behalf of the reflection
which had just been on the point of emerging and had in-
stantly disappeared, the inevitableness of the relapse. In a
word, an absolutely categorical imperative is instinctive or som-
nambulistic, enacted as such in a normal state, represented as
such if reflection is roused long enough to take form, not long
enough to seek for reasons. But, then, is it not evident that,
in a reasonable being, an imperative will tend to become cate-
gorical in proportion as the activity brought into play, although
intelligent, will tend to become instinctive? But an activity
which, starting as intelligent, progresses towards an imitation
of instinct is exactly what we call, in man, a habit. And the
most powerful habit, the habit whose strength is made up of
the accumulated force of all the elementary social habits, is
necessarily the one which best imitates instinct. Is it then sur-
prising that, in the short moment which separates obligation
merely experienced as a living force from obligation fully real-
ized and justified by ail sorts of reasons, obligation should in-
deed take the form of the categorical imperative: “You must
because you must”?

Let us consider two divergent lines of evolution with socie-
ties at the extremities of each. The type of society which will
appear the more natural will obviously be the instinctive type;
the link that unites the bees of a hive resembles far more the
link which holds together the cells of an organism, co-ordinate
and subordinate to one another. Let us suppose for an instant
that nature has intended to produce at the extremity of the
second line societies where a certain latitude was left to indi-
vidual choice: she would have arranged that intelligence should
achieve here results comparable, as regards their regularity,
to those of instinct in the other; she would have had recourse
to habit. Each of these habits, which may be called “moral,”
would be incidental. But the aggregate of them, I mean the
habit of contracting these habits, being at the very basis of

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societies and a necessary condition of their existence, would
have a force comparable to that of instinct in respect to both
intensity and regularity. This is exactly what we have called
the “totality of obligation.” This, be it said, will apply only
to human societies at the moment of emerging from the hands
of nature. It will apply to primitive and to elementary socie-
ties. But, however much human society may progress, grow
complicated and spiritualized, the original design, expressing
the purpose of nature, will remain.

Now this is exactly what has happened. Without going
deeply into a matter we have dealt with elsewhere, let us sim-
ply say that intelligence and instinct are forms of conscious-
ness which must have interpenetrated each other in their rudi-
mentary state and become dissociated as they grew. This de-
velopment occurred on the two main lines of evolution of
animal life, with the Arthropods and the Vertebrates. At the
end of the former we have the instinct of insects, more espe-
cially the Hymenoptera; at the end of the second, human intel-
ligence. Instinct and intelligence have each as their essential
object the utilization of implements: in the first case, organs
supplied by nature and hence immutable ; in the second, in-
vented tools, and therefore varied and unforeseen. The imple-
ment is, moreover, designed for a certain type of work, and
this work is all the more efficient the more it is specialized,
the more it is divided up between diversely qualified workers
who mutually supplement one another. Social life is thus im-
manent, like a vague ideal, in instinct as well as in intelli-
gence ; this ideal finds its most complete expression in the
hive or the anthill on the one hand, in human societies on the
other. Whether human or animal, a society is an organization 3
it implies a co-ordination and generally also a subordination
of elements 3 it therefore exhibits, whether merely embodied
in life or, in addition, specifically formulated, a collection of
rules and laws. But in a hive or an anthill the individual is

riveted to his task by his structure, and the organization is

relatively invariable, whereas the human community is vari-
able in form, open to every kind of progress. The result is

that in the former each rule is laid down by nature and is

HENRI BERGSON

629

necessary; whereas in the latter only one thing is natural, the
necessity of a rule. Thus the more, in human society, we delve
down to the root of the various obligations to reach obligation
in general, the more obligation will tend to become necessity,
the nearer it will draw", in its peremptory aspect, to instinct.
And yet we should make a great mistake if we tried to ascribe
any particular obligation, whatever it might be, to instinct.
What we must perpetually recall is that, no one obligation
being instinctive, obligation as a whole would have been in-
stinct if human societies were not, $0 to speak, ballasted with
variability and intelligence. It is a virtual instinct, like that
which lies behind the habit of speech. The morality of a human
society may indeed be compared to its language. If ants ex-
change signs, which seems probable, those signs are provided
by the very instinct that makes the ants communicate with
one another. On the contrary, our languages are the product
of custom. Nothing in the vocabulary, or even in the syntax,
comes from nature. But speech is natural, and unvarying signs,
natural in origin, which are presumably used in a community
of insects, exhibit what our language would have been, if na-
ture in bestowing on us the faculty of speech had not added
that function which, since it makes and uses tools, is inventive
and called intelligence. We must perpetually recur to what
obligation would have been if human society had been instinc-
tive instead of intelligent. This will not explain any particular
obligation; we should even give of obligation in general an
idea which would be false, if we went no further; and yet we
must think of this instinctive society as the counterpart of intel-
ligent society, if we are not to start without any clue in quest
of the foundations of morality.

From this point of view obligation loses its specific character.
It ranks among the most general phenomena of life. When the
elements which go to make up an organism submit to a rigid
discipline, can we say that they feel themselves liable to obli-
gation and that they are obeying a social instinct? Obviously
not; but whereas such an organism is barely a community, the
hive and the anthill are actual organisms, the elements of which
are united by invisible ties, and the social instinct of an ant — I

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mean the force by virtue of which the worker, for example,
performs the task to which she is predestined by her structure —
cannot differ radically from the cause, whatever it be, by vir-
tue of which every tissue, every cell of a living body, toils for
the greatest good of the whole. Indeed it is, strictly speaking,
no more a matter of obligation in the one case than in the
other, but rather of necessity. It is just this necessity that we
perceive, not actual but virtual, at the foundations of moral
obligation, as through a more or less transparent veil. A human
being feels an obligation only if he is free, and each obligation,
considered separately, implies liberty. But it is necessary that
there should be obligations, and the deeper we go, away from
those particular obligations which are at the top, towards obli-
gation in general, or, as we have said, towards obligation as a
whole, which is at the bottom, the more obligation appears
as the very form assumed by necessity in the realm of life,
when it demands, for the accomplishment of certain ends, intel-
ligence, choice, and therefore liberty.

Jacques Mari tain

Professor of Philosophy, Catholic Institute of Paris;
Institute of Medieval Studies of Toronto

THE CONQUEST OF FREEDOM 1

I. FREEDOM OF INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM OF

CHOICE

I N this essay I shall not treat of free will or freedom of
choice. The existence and value of this kind of freedom
are, however, taken for granted by all I shall say. That is
why I shall first give a few brief indications in their regard.
The freedom I shall treat of subsequently is the freedom of
independence and of exultation, which can be called also — in
a Paulinian but not Kantian sense — freedom of autonomy, or
also, freedom of expansion of the human person. It takes for
granted the existence of freedom of choice in us, but it is sub-
stantially distinct from it.

A badly constructed philosophical theory that falsifies the
reflective operation by which the mind of man knows itself ex-
plicitly can counteract and paralyze the primary and natural
operation of spontaneous consciousness. As long as we are not
victims of this accident each of us knows very well that he
possesses freedom of choice, that is to say, that if we betray
a friend, risk our property to aid some unfortunate, decide to
become a banker, monk, or soldier, these kinds of acts are what
they are only because we have involved therein our personality
and have arranged that they be so rather than not. But each

1 Translated by Harry McNeill and Emmanuel Chapman, Professors of
Philosophy, Fordham University.

631

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of us knows very poorly wherein freedom of choice lies. This
obscurity of spontaneous consciousness, unable to bring forth
what is implicit in the matter, enables philosophers, and espe-
cially savants who philosophize without knowing it, frequently
to becloud the question.

Philosophers professing absolute intellectualism cannot un-
derstand the existence of free will because in their eyes intelli-
gence not only precedes will, but precedes it in the manner
of a divinity apart, which touches the will without being
touched by it and without receiving from it any qualifying
action. Hence the domain of formal or specifying determina-
tion (what is called the or do specificationis) can never itself
depend intrinsically upon the domain of efficiency or existential
effectuation {or do exercitii ), and the will is reduced to a func-
tion by which the intelligence realizes ideas which in virtue
of the mere object they represent appear best to the subject.
Such was the position of the great metaphysicians of the classic
age.

Pure empiricists likewise cannot understand the existence
of free will, because, recognizing only sensory sequences, the
idea of causality exercised upon a spirit by itself has no mean-
ing for them. Hence when they voice an opinion on a question,
which, like that of free will, lies essentially in the ontological
order, they, as metaphysicians in spite of themselves (and bad
ones at that), can only interpret the empirical results of ob-
servational science in the framework of classic mechanism inher-
ited from Spinoza, and give themselves over, without know-
ing what they are doing, to the most naive extrapolations. To
the extent that science reveals dynamic elements working in our
psychical activity, they see in the mere existence of these ele-
ments the proof that the same operate in a necessarily deter-
mining fashion — which is precisely what remains to be proved.

In our times Freudism offers the pseudo-metaphysical em-
piricist the greatest possibilities for illusion. I have shown else-
where that it is very important to distinguish most clearly
between the psychoanalytic method, which opens to investiga-
tion in the unconscious new roads of the greatest interest, and
the philosophy (unconscious of itself) that Freud has sought

JACQUES MARITAIN 633

in crass empiricism, thereby leaving the field o£ his competence
and giving full reign to his dreams. The fact, revealed by psy-
choanalysis, that there are unconscious motivations which the
subject obeys without knowing them furnishes in no manner,
as some would imagine, an argument against free will, for free
will begins with intellectual judgment and consciousness. To
the extent that unconscious motivation makes us act automat-
ically, there is no question of free will 5 and to the extent that
it gives rise to a conscious judgment, the question is whether
or not at this moment it fashions this judgment, or by means
of free choice is rendered decisively motivating by this judg-
ment. In other words, the question is whether unconscious mo-
tivations are necessarily determining or simply contributing, and
it is clear that the mere fact of their existence is not sufficient
to decide the question.

In general, human free will does not exclude but presup-
poses the vast and complex dynamism of instincts, tendencies,
psycho-physical dispositions, acquired habits, and hereditary
traits, and it is at the top point where this dynamism emerges
in the world of spirit that freedom of choice is exercised, to
give or withhold decisive efficacy to the inclinations and urges
of nature. It follows from this that freedom, as well as respon-
sibility, is capable of a multiplicity of degrees of which the
author of being alone is judge. It does not follow from this
that freedom does not exist — on the contrary! If it admits of
degrees, then it exists.

The efforts of eminent scientists, like Professor Compton,
to link indeterminist theories of modern physics to our natural
belief in free will may be highly significant and stimulating
to the mind and efficacious in eliminating many prejudices,
but I do not think that a strict proof providing this belief with
an unshakable intellectual basis can be found in that direction.
The direction to follow is metaphysical. It brings us to for-
mulas like those of M. Bergson: “Our motivations are what
we make them”; “Our reasons are determined for us only at
the moment that they become determining; that is, at the mo-
ment when the act is virtually accomplished.” But it is not by
an irrational philosophy of pure becoming, it is by a philosophy

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of being and intelligence like that of St. Thomas Aquinas that
such formulas receive their full significance and demonstra-
tive value.

Spirit as such implies a sort of infinity ; its faculty of desire
of itself seeks a good which satisfies absolutely, therefore a good
without limit, and we cannot have any desire which is not com-
prehended in this general desire for happiness. But as soon
as reflection occurs, our intelligence, confronted with goods
that are not the Good, and judging them so, brings into actual-
ity the radical indetermination that our appetite for happiness
possesses in regard to everything which is not happiness itself.
Efficacious motivation of an intelligent being can be only a
practical judgment: and this judgment owes to the will the
whole of its efficaciousness $ it is will, impelled by its own unpre-
dictable initiative towards the good presented to it by such
and such a judgment, that gives this judgment the power of
specifying the will efficaciously.

The free act, in which the intelligence and will involve and
envelope each other vitally, is thus like an instantaneous flash
in which the active and dominating indetermination of the will
operates in regard to the judgment itself which determines it 5
the will can do nothing without an intellectual judgment 5 and
it is will that makes itself determined by judgment and by
this judgment rather than by another one.

Far from being a simple function of the intelligence, by
which the latter realizes ideas which in virtue of their mere
object appear best, the will is an original spiritual energy of
infinite capacity which has control over the intelligence and its
judgments in the order of practical choice and makes what
the will wants appear best to the subject here and now . What
constitutes the real mystery of free will is that while essentially
needing intellectual specification, the exercise of the will has
primacy over the latter and holds it under its active and dom-
inating indetermination because the will alone can give it exis-
tential efficacy.

After this preliminary explanation of freedom of choice, I
shall now discuss the freedom of independence.

JACQUES MARITAIN

63 5

II. FREEDOM OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE
ASPIRATIONS OF THE PERSON

Human personality is a great metaphysical mystery. We
know that an essential characteristic of a civilization worthy of
the name is meaning and respect for the dignity of the human
person. We know that to defend the rights and freedom of the
human person we must be willing to sacrifice our most precious
possessions and our lives. What values, then, deserving of such
sacrifice, are enveloped in the personality of man? What do
we mean precisely when we speak of the human person? When
we say that a man is a person, we do not mean merely that
he is an individual, in the sense that an atom, a blade of
grass, a fly, or an elephant is an individual. Man is an indi-
vidual who holds himself in hand by his intelligence and his
will; he exists not merely in a physical fashion. He has spir-
itual superexistence through knowledge and love, so that he is,
in a way, a universe in himself, a microcosmos, in which the
great universe in its entirety can be encompassed through
knowledge. By love he can give himself completely to beings
who are to him, as it were, other selves. For this relation no
equivalent can be found in the physical world. The human
person possesses these characteristics because in the last analysis
man, this flesh and these perishable bones which are animated
and activated by a divine fire, exists “from the womb to the
grave” by virtue of the existence itself of his soul, which dom-
inates time and death. Spirit is the root of personality. The
notion of personality thus involves that of totality and inde-
pendence; no matter how poor and crushed a person may be,
he is a whole, and as a person, subsistent in an independent
manner. To say that a man is a person is to say that in the
depth of his being he is more a whole than a part and more
independent than servile. It is to say that he is a minute frag-
ment of matter that is at the same time a universe, a beggar
who participates in the absolute being, mortal flesh whose value
is eternal, and a bit of straw into which heaven enters. It is
this metaphysical mystery that religious thought designates

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636

when it says that the person is the image of God. The value
of the person, his dignity and rights, belong to the order of
things naturally sacred which bear the imprint of the Father
of Being, and which have in him the end of their movement.

Freedom of spontaneity, on the other hand, is not, as free
will, a power of choice that transcends all necessity, even in-
terior necessity and all determinism. It does not imply the
absence of necessity but merely the absence of constraint. It
is the power of acting by virtue of its own internal inclination
and without undergoing the coaotion imposed by an exterior
agent.

This kind of freedom admits of all sorts of degrees, from
the spontaneity of the electron turning “freely” around a nu-
cleus, that is, without deviating from its path by the interfer-
ence of a foreign particle, to the spontaneity of the grass in the
fields which grows “freely” and of the bird that flies “freely,”
that is, obeying only the internal necessities of their nature.
When freedom of spontaneity passes the threshold of the
spirit and is the spontaneity of a spiritual nature, it becomes
properly freedom of independence. To this extent it does not
consist merely in following the inclination of nature but in
being or making oneself actively the sufficient principle of
one’s own operation 3 in other words, in perfecting oneself as
an indivisible whole in the act one brings about. This is why
freedom of independence exists only in beings which also have
free will, and presupposes the exercise of free will in order
to arrive at its end.

If the proper sign of personality consists, as I have just said,
in the fact of being independent, of being a whole, it is clear
that personality and freedom of independence are related and
inseparable. In the scale of being they increase together 5 at the
summit of being God is person in pure act and freedom of
independence in pure act. He is so personal that his existence
is his very act of knowing and loving, and He is so independent
that while causing all things, He Himself is absolutely with-
out cause, his essence being his very act of existence.

In each of us personality and freedom of independence in-
crease together. For man is a being in movement. If he does

JACQUES MARITAIN 637

not augment, he has nothing, and he loses what he had; he
must fight for his being. The entire history of his fortunes and
misfortunes is the history of his effort to win together with his
own personality, freedom of independence. He is called to the
conquest of freedom.

Two basic truths must be noted here. The first is that the
human being, though a person and therefore independent
because he is a spirit, is, however, by nature at the lowest de-
gree of perfection and independence because he is a spirit
united substantially with matter and implacably subject to a.
bodily condition. Secondly, no matter how miserable, how
poor, how enslaved and humiliated he may be, the aspirations
of personality in him remain unconquerable; and they tend
as such, in the life of each of us as in the life of the human
race, toward the conquest of freedom.

The aspirations of personality are of. two types. On the one
hand, they come from the human person as human or as con-
stituted in such a species; let us call them “connatural” to man
and specifically human. On the other hand, they come from
the human person in so far as he is a person or participating in
that transcendental perfection that is personality and which
is realized in God infinitely better than in us. Let us call them
then “transnatural” and metaphysical aspirations.

The connatural aspirations tend to a relative freedom com-
patible with conditions here below, and the burden of ma-
terial nature inflicts upon them from the very beginning a
serious defeat because no animal is born more naked and less
free than man. The struggle to win freedom in the order of
social life aims to make up for this defeat.

The transnatural aspirations of the person in us seek super-
human freedom, pure and simple freedom. And to whom be-
longs such freedom if not to Him alone who is freedom of in-
dependence itself, subsistent by itself? Man has no right to
the freedom proper to God. When he aspires by a transnatural
desire to this freedom, he seeks it in an “inefficacious” man-
ner and without even knowing what it is. Thus divine tran-
scendence imposes immediately the admission of a profound
defeat on the part of these metaphysical aspirations of the per-

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son in us. However, such a defeat is not irreparable, at least if
the victor descends to the aid of the vanquished. The move-
ment to win freedom in the order of spiritual life aims pre-
cisely to make up for this defeat. But we must not hide from
ourselves the fact that the point at which our reflection has
now arrived is a crucial one for the human being. The least
error costs dearly. In this knot capital errors, mortal for human
society and the human soul, are mixed with capital truths to
which are bound the life of the soul and that of society. We
must work as hard as possible to distinguish truths from errors.
There is a false conquest of freedom which is illusory and
homicidal. There is a true conquest of freedom which provides
truth and life for mankind.

In order to try to dissociate briefly one from the other, let
me say that the false manner of understanding the attainment
of freedom is based upon a philosophy called in technical lan-
guage a univocalist” and “immanentist.” In such a philosophy
the notion of independence and freedom admits of neither in-
ternal variety nor degrees ; and on the other hand God, if he
exists, is conceived as a physical agent magnified ad infinitum;
hence either he is considered transcendent and his existence is
denied because he would be, as Proudhon believed, a sort of
heavenly Tyrant imposing constraint and violence on all that
is not his own; or, on the other hand, his existence is affirmed
and his transcendence is denied — all things are considered in
the manner of Spinoza or Hegel as modes or phases of his
realization. In this way of thinking there is neither freedom nor
autonomy except in so far as no objective rule or measure is
received from a being other than oneself. And the human per-
son claims for itself then divine freedom, so that man takes, in
atheistic forms of thought and culture, the place of the God he
denies, or man through pantheistic forms tries to realize in act
an identity of nature with the God he imagines.

On the contrary, the true manner of understanding the at-
tainment of freedom is based upon a philosophy of the analogy
of being and divine transcendence. For this philosophy inde-
pendence and freedom are realized, on the various levels of
being, in several forms which are typically diverse: in God

JACQUES MARITAIN 639

in an absolute manner, and because (being supereminently all
things) he is supreme interiority, of which all existing things
are a participation ; in us in a relative manner, and thanks to
the privileges of spirit which, however profound may be the
state of dependence in which it is placed by the very nature of
things, makes itself independent by its own operation when it
poses interiorly to itself by knowledge and love the law it obeys.
In such a philosophy divine transcendence imposes no violence
nor constraint upon creatures, but rather infuses them with
goodness and spontaneity and is more internal to them than
they are to themselves. It is not true that the autonomy of an
intelligent creature consists in not receiving any rule or objec-
tive measure from a being other than itself. It consists in con-
forming to such rules and measures voluntarily because they are
known to be just and true, and because of a love for truth and
justice. Such is human freedom, properly speaking, to which
the person tends as towards a connatural perfection; and if the
person aspires also to superhuman freedom, this thirst for trans-
natural perfection, whose satisfaction is not due us, will be fully
quenched only by the reception of more than is desired, and
thanks to a transforming union with the Uncreated Nature.
God is free from all eternity; more exactly, He is subsistent
freedom. Man is not born free unless in the basic potencies of
his being: he becomes free, by warring upon himself and thanks
to many sorrows; by .the struggle of the spirit and virtue; by
exercising his freedom he wins his freedom. So that at long
last a freedom better than he expected is given him. From the
beginning to the end it is truth that liberates him.

III. TRUE AND FALSE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION

The first problem of vital importance evoked by the preced-
ing considerations can be called the problem of true and false
political emancipation. In fact, the conquest of freedom in the
social and political order is the central hope characterizing the
historical ideal of the last two centuries, which has constituted
at once their dynamic urge, their power of truth and of illusion.
What I call false political emancipation is the philosophy and

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the social and political practice (and the corresponding emo-
tional orchestration) based upon the false manner of under-
standing the conquest of freedom that I have briefly discussed.
Necessarily this engenders myths that devour the human sub-
stance. What I call true political emancipation is the philosophy
and the social and political practice (and the corresponding
emotional orchestration) based upon the true manner of win-
ning freedom 5 this leads to no myth but to a concrete historical
ideal and to a patient labor of forming and educating the human
substance.

The misfortune in the eyes of a philosopher of culture is the
fact that great democratic movements of modern times have
sought true political emancipation under false standards. I mean
that in the obscure work produced in the hearts of men and in
their history we find a treasury of aspirations, efforts, and social
enterprise obtained sometimes at the price of heroic sacrifices
and originally directed towards the conquest of freedom — we
find this treasury conceptualized in the metaphysics of the false
conquest of freedom 3 and to the extent that this work has been
thus corrupted and deformed by a false philosophy of life, it is
accompanied by error, destruction, and ravages which tend to
the negation of its own vital principle and which finally make
the democratic ideal seem to many minds an imposture. The
spasms through which Europe is passing testify to the immense
gravity of this historical phenomenon. If the true city of human
rights, the true democracy, does not succeed in freeing itself
from the false, if in the ordeal of fire and blood a radical puri-
fication is not brought about, Western civilization risks enter-
ing upon a night without end. If we are confident that this will
not happen, it is because we are confident that the necessary
renovations will occur.

Truly, and even by reason of the complex and ambivalent
phenomenon just referred to, the word democracy itself has
become so equivocal that it would be perhaps desirable, as I
have already urged several times, to find a new word to desig-
nate what I called a moment ago the true city of human rights.
Moreover, the political philosophy involved therein goes largely
beyond this or that classically recognized foliticd regime . It is

JACQUES MARITAIN 64 1

equally suitable to the regimen mixtum — at once monarchical,
aristocratic, and democratic — which was the best regime in the
mind of St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as to a strictly democratic,
political regime. But we are not free to revise at will the
vocabulary of concrete and historico-social matters. If a new
democracy is actively realized in common consciousness and in
existence, it will discover a satisfactory name for itself.

For the sake of further clarification let me say briefly that
the false political emancipation (the false city of human rights)
has as its principle the “anthropocentric” conception that Rous-
seau and Kant made out of the autonomy of the person. Ac-
cording to them man is free only if he obeys himself alone y and
man is constituted by right of nature in such a state of freedom
(which Rousseau considered as lost from the fact of the cor-
ruption involved in social life and which Kant relegated to the
noumenal world). In a word, this is the divinization of the in-
dividual. Its logical consequences in the political and social
order are threefold : In the first place, practical atheism of
society (for there is no place for two gods in the world, and if
the individual is practically god, God is no longer God except
perhaps in a decorative way and for private use). In the second
place, the theoretical and practical disappearance of the idea of
the common good. In the third place, the theoretical and prac-
tical disappearance of the idea of ruler and the idea of author-
ity falsely considered to be incompatible with freedom: and this
in the political sphere (where the possessors of authority should
direct men not towards the private good of other men but
towards the common good) as well as in the sphere of labor
and of economics (where the technical exigencies of production
demand that men work, in extremely diverse ways and propor-
tions, for the private good of other men). By virtue of an
inevitable internal dialectic this social divinization of the indi-
vidual, inaugurated by bourgeois liberalism, leads to the social
divinization of the State and of the anonymous mass incarnate
in a Leader who is no longer a normal ruler but a sort of in-
human monster whose omnipotence is based upon myths and
lies. At the same time bourgeois liberalism makes way for rev-

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olutionary totalitarianism, communist or racist, and for general
slavery.

True political emancipation, on the contrary, or the true city
of human rights, has as its principle a conception of the au-
tonomy of the person in conformity with the nature of things
and therefore “theocentric.” According to this notion obedience,
accepted for justice’s sake, is not opposed to freedom. It is, on
the contrary, a normal way of arriving at freedom. Man must
gradually win freedom, which consists in the political and social
order above all in becoming, under given historical conditions,
as independent as possible of the restrictions of material nature.
The human person rises above society to the extent that he is
made for God and for eternal life, and owes what he is to supra-
social values. He is part of society as of a greater and better
whole, to the extent that he owes to society what he is.

Thus the true city of human rights recognizes as God only
one God: God himself and no created thing; and this city
understands that human society, despite the diverse religious
families living within it, implies a religious principle and pre-
supposes that God is accessible to our reason and is the last end
of our existence. This city is founded upon the authentic notion
of the common good — which is something different from a col-
lection of private goods, but which demands to be redistributed
to individual persons; it implies the effective respect for their
rights and has itself as an essential element their access to the
maximum development and freedom compatible with given
historical conditions. This city finally implies an authentic no-
tion of ruler and authority.

For the true city of human rights, the possessors of authority
in the political sphere are, in a democratic regime, designated
by the people. They govern the people by virtue of this desig-
/ nation (“government by the people”) and for the common
good of the people (“government for the people”), but they
really have the right to command; and they command free
persons each of whom is called to participate concretely to a
certain degree in political life and who are not abandoned like
atoms but rather are grouped in organic communities from the
family, which forms the natural basic community, up.

JACQUES MARITAIN 643

In the sphere of labor and economic relations the true city
of human rights demands that the constant development of
social justice compensate for the restrictions imposed upon man
by the necessities (in themselves not human but technical) of
labor and production. We know that to serve the private good
of another man and become to this extent an organ of the same
is in itself an affliction for the radical aspirations of person-
ality, but we also know that this is a condition imposed upon
men by material nature, which will last in various forms and
proportions as long as the earth itself. This true city of hu-
man rights demands that, by a persevering struggle for im-
provement due at once to the perfection and extension of me-
chanical equipment and to the tension of spiritual energies
transforming secular life from within, the conditions of work
become less and less servile and tend to a state of real deliver-
ance for‘ the human person. At the present stage of historical
development it would seem that for certain types of workers
this result can be obtained to a remarkable degree- — after the
catastrophe which the world is suffering today has brought about
a reformation of economic structures and of the spirit— not only
by lessening the hours of work but also by giving the workers
a part in the ownership and management of the enterprise.

But here, as in the political sphere, the inauguration of new
structures, no matter how important, does not suffice. The soul
of social life is fashioned by that which superabounds in it from
the true internal life of individual persons, from the gift of
self which that life involves, and from a gratuitous generosity
whose source lies in the inmost part of the heart. More con-
cisely, good will and a relation of respect and love between
persons alone can give to the movement of the social body a
truly human character. If the person has the opportunity of
being treated as such in social life and by it, and if the thankless
works which this life imposes can be made easy and happy and
even exalting, it is first due to the development of right and to
institutions of right. But it is also and indispensably due to the
development of civic friendship, with the confidence and mutual
devotion this implies on the part of those who direct as well
as those who carry it out. For the true city of human rights,

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644

fraternity is not a privilege of nature which flows from the
natural goodness of man and which the State need only pro-
claim. It is the end of a slow and difficult conquest which de-
mands virtue and sacrifice and a perpetual victory of man over
himself. In this sense we can say that the heroic ideal towards
which true political emancipation tends is the inauguration of
a fraternal city. It is seen here how, in fact, true political eman-
cipation depends on the Christian ferment deposited in the
world and presupposes finally as the most profound stimulus
evangelical love exalting things of earthly civilization in their
proper order.

The properties that I have just sketched were not absent
from the democratic movement and hopes of modern times.
They characterize, on the contrary, what was unconsciously ex-
ercised most profoundly and vitally in it. But this good seed
was corrupted and vitiated by false political emancipation, and
the monsters engendered by the latter grew more quickly than
the authentic seed. We thus have a presentiment of the vast
purifications and renovations referred to above.

IV. THE TRUE AND FALSE DEIFICATION OF MAN

There is a true and false emancipation in the political and
social order. In the spiritual order there is a true and false
deification of man. This is another problem of vital importance,
fundamental and absolutely primary, posited by the natural
instinct which impels man to win freedom.

As I have said at the beginning of this essay, by the fact that
we participate in the transcendental perfection designated by
the word personality, we have within us transnatural aspirations
the satisfaction of which is not due us in justice but which never-
theless torment us and tend to a superhuman freedom, freedom
pure and simple — that is to say, to a divine freedom. Evidence
of these aspirations for the superhuman, these desires to reach
the borders of divinity, has been presented by the sages of all
times.

The great spiritual errors also bear witness to these aspira-
tions. They seek the deification of man, but by man’s own forces

JACQUES MARITAIN 645

and the development of the powers of his nature only. More
often they take a pantheistic form, as can be seen in the gnostic
currents of former times, in the great monistic metaphysics, and
in the mysticism of quietism. It was left, however, to modem
times to look for the deification of man by doing away with
wisdom and breaking with God. Historically, in my opinion,
the two main sources of this false deification are: (1) The im-
manentist conception of conscience which since the Lutheran
revolution has gradually gained the ascendancy, and which de-
mands that man within himself — “my interior freedom” — con-
struct morality by himself alone without owing anything to law.
(2) The idealist conception of science which since the Cartesian
revolution has gradually gained the ascendancy and which de-
mands that man within himself — “my self or my spirit” — con-
struct truth by himself alone without owing anything to things.
Hyperspiritualist as it first seems, these two conceptions make
science independent of being and conscience independent of law,
and claim for that which is within man the kind of independence
proper to God. In reality these two erroneous conceptions ma-
terialize the human soul and plunge it into external action,
where by seeking its proper and only mode of realization it
becomes the slave of time, matter, and the world. Science finally
will be subjugated by a kind of demiurgic imperialism applied
to enslave material nature to the lusts of human beings. Con-
science too will be subjugated by a kind of demonic imperialism
applied to “oppose oneself” in order to “pose oneself,” follow-
ing the phrase of Fichte, and to realize oneself by dominating
others. Man, become the god of this world, will believe that
he will find divine freedom for himself by being independent
of God, and consequently by the radical negation of God. The
false deification of man will take the atheistic form which
appears in our days in an amazingly barbarous light.

It had its first experiences in the disguised atheism of ortho-
dox Kantianism and bourgeois liberalism. After the bankruptcy
of this atheism which found religion “good for the people,” and
after the failure of the false individualistic conquest of freedom
and personality, it was inevitable that the false deification of man
be affirmed by the open atheism of Marxist Hegelianism which

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646

sees in religion “the opium of the people,” or the open pagan-
ism of racism which reduces religion to the idolatry of the “soul
of the people*” Plebeian totalitarianism, either under the Soviet
Communist or German Nazi form, then undertakes to lead col-
lective man by war, forced labor, and the standardization of
souls to the achievement of freedom. Inevitably, from the mo-
ment that absolute freedom, emancipation pure and simple, di-
vine independence, were sought in the human itself, or in other
words, from the moment that the transnatural aspirations of
the person were lowered into the sphere of connatural aspira-
tions — and by that very fact perverted and made infinite — the
social had to become deified, the things of Caesar had to absorb
monstrously the things of God, and the pagan empire had to
make itself adored.

On the contrary, the transnatural aspirations of the human
person tend normally towards God, the transcendental cause
of being, and they incite the soul to seek liberation in him.
Despite all its imperfections and blemishes such was the elan
of the great Hellenic wisdom. In Hindu spirituality, however,
at least if its too great proliferation, at times poisonous, is re-
duced to what is most pure in it, are found the most significant
examples of states where these transnatural aspirations lead man
by his own action and the ascetic use of his natural powers to
turn his own nature against its own current. I think that what
in Christian language we call the “natural” mystical experience
and the highest “natural” contemplation then reaches by the
way of an entirely intellectual self-annihilation the substance
of Self, and through and in it the divine Omnipresence. 2 This
is a liberation and deliverance at one and the same time ultimate
in the order of what nature is capable of, and not ultimate,
absolutely speaking, in regard to our real destiny and its hidden
primordial truth that nature has been made for grace. Hence
this attainment of spiritual freedom is ambivalent: true and
authentic on its plane if the soul does not stop there and it opens
itself to the highest gifts 5 false and deceptive if the soul stops

2 See my Quatre essais sur V esprit dans sa condition charnelle y Paris, 1939,
Chap. III.

JACQUES MARITAIN 647

there or if it looks upon it as a necessary means, or if it takes
it for deification.

There is, however, a true deification of man. Ego dixi: dii
estis . This is called eternal life — which begins obscurely here on
earth. It is as fatal to renounce perfect liberation as it is to try
to reach it by the wrong ways, that is to say, by oneself alone.
The transnatural aspirations are supernaturally fulfilled, and
by a gift which surpasses anything we can conceive. What is
grace, the theologians ask, if not a formal participation in the
Divine Nature, in other terms, a deifying life received from
God.

The mystery of this is that the supreme freedom and inde-
pendence of man are won by the supreme spiritual realization of
his dependence, his dependence on a Being who being life itself
vivifies, and being freedom itself liberates, all who participate
in His essence. This kind of dependence is not one of external
constraint, as is the case of one physical agent in regard to an-
other physical agent. The more he realizes it the more does
man participate in the nature of the Absolute. Men who have
become something of God participate in the freedom of Him
who cannot be contained by anything. By losing themselves
they have won a mysterious and disappropriated personality
which makes them act by virtue of that which they are eternally
in the Uncreated Essence. Born of spirit they are like spirit free.
To tell the truth, they have won nothing, and they have re-
ceived all. While they worked and suffered to attain freedom,
it gave itself to them. The true conquest of supreme and abso-
lute freedom is to be made free by Subsistent Freedom and to
consent freely to it. The true deification of man consists in open-
ing himself to the gift which the Absolute gives of itself, and
the descent of the divine plenitude into the intelligent creature.
What I am saying is that this is all the work of love. Law pro-
tects freedom and teaches us to practice it. When love follows
the path of law it leads through law to emancipation from all
servitude, even the servitude of the law. I have often quoted,
and I wish to quote again, the text from the Sumrrn contra
Gentiles where St. Thomas comments on St. Paul, which I

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regard as one of the great texts absolutely fundamental for the
spiritual constitution of humanity.

We must observe [St. Thomas says] that the sons of God are led
by the divine Spirit, not as though they were slaves, but as being
free. For, since to be free is to be cause of one’s own actions, we
are said to do freely what we do of ourselves. Now this is what we
do willingly : and what we do unwillingly, we do, not freely but under
compulsion. This compulsion may be absolute, when the cause is
wholly extraneous, and the patient contributes nothing to the action,
for instance, when a man is compelled to move by force; or it may
be partly voluntary, as when a man is willing to do or suffer that
which is less opposed to his will, in order to avoid that which is more
opposed thereto. Now, the sanctifying Spirit inclines us to act, in
such a way as to make us act willingly, inasmuch as He causes us
to be lovers of God, Hence the sons of God are led by the Holy
Ghost to act freely and for love, not slavishly and for fear: where-
fore the Apostle says (Rom. 8:15): You have not received the
Spirit of bondage again in fear ,* but you have received the spirit of
adoption of sons.

Now the will is by its essence directed to that which is truly good:
so that when, either through passion or through an evil habit or dis-
position, a man turns away from what is truly good, he acts slavishly,
in so far as he is led by something extraneous, if we consider the nat-
ural direction of the will ,* but if we consider the act of the will, as
inclined here and now towards an apparent good , he acts freely
when he follows the passion or evil habit, but he acts slavishly if,
while his will remains the same, he refrains from what he desires
through fear of the law which forbids the fulfillment of his desire.
Accordingly, when the divine Spirit by love inclines the will to the
true good to which it is naturally directed, He removes both the
servitude [the heteronomy, as we would say today] whereby a man,
the slave of passion and sin, acts against the order of the will, and
the servitude whereby a man acts against the inclination of his will,
and in obedience to the law, as the slave and not the friend of the
law. Wherefore the Apostle says (II Cor. 3:17): Where the Spirit
of the Lord is } there is liberty , and (Gal. 5:18) : If you are led by
the Spirit you are not under the law . 3

Great is the distance between the imperfect liberation whereby
the highest techniques of natural spirituality oblige nature to

3 St. Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles , IV". 22.

JACQUES MARITAIN 649

satisfy in some way the transnatural aspirations of the human
person, and the perfect freedom whereby the supernatural gift
the Divine Personality gives of itself to the created personality
more than fulfills these aspirations. While leaving intact the
distinction of natures, love, which at the end of spiritual growth
creates this perfect freedom, also makes man become a god
by participation. At the same time, far from enclosing itself in
an altogether intellectual contemplation which does away with
action, the freedom we mean lives by a contemplation which,
since it proceeds from love, superabounds in action and pene-
trates to that which is most intimate in the world. The heroism
it implies does not retreat into the sacred; it spills over into
the profane and sanctifies it. Detached from perfection in per-
fection itself, because it wants more to love than to be without
fault, it awakens, more and more, good will and brotherly love.

To return to the distinction between the social-temporal and
the spiritual, the things which belong to Caesar and those which
belong to God, I should point out, finally, that the false deifi-
cation of man results, as we have seen, in the confusion of the
temporal and the spiritual, a perverse adoration of the social,
and temporal relativities erected into an absolute; conversely,
the true deification of man, because it is accomplished by the
grace of the incarnation and draws to itself all that is human,
demands of divine things that they descend into the most pro-
found depths of the human, and insists that the political and
social order, while remaining essentially distinct from the spir-
itual, be pervaded and intrinsically superelevated by the current
which flows into souls from the Absolute. In the degree, small as
it might be in fact, that things are this way, in that degree the
historical march of civilization in the attainment of relative
freedom, which responds to the connatural aspirations of human
personality, is in accord and in mutual concourse with the supra-
historical movement of the soul in the conquest of absolute free-
dom, which responds, in transcending divinely, to the tram-
natural aspirations of the person as a person.

Herbert W. Schneider

Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University

THE LIBERTIES OF MAN

I T is my distinctive task not to contribute another essay on
freedom to this volume, but, as the first of its readers, to
report how the foregoing essays 1 illumine each other and
when they leave their subject and their readers in the dark.
Each essay has examined freedom in a particular context 3 it
would be worse than useless were I to rob the problems of free-
dom of these contexts and to discuss kinds of freedom in ab-
straction as merely a series of possible definitions. My aim is
rather to examine the relations that these various contexts and
liberties bear to the structure of culture. For one of the objects
of this Series is to make a contribution to the knowledge of cul-
ture by discovering the nature of freedom and how man’s free-
dom is embedded or embalmed, as the case may be, in his insti-
tutions. To do this is particularly difficult, because many of the
essays in this volume are philosophical and their treatments of
freedom are most readily intelligible when seen in the context
of a philosophical system. Being accustomed to dealing with
ideas in their philosophical contexts, I feel at the outset that I
am doing violence to my profession and to my colleagues when
I take an idea of freedom from the system in which it is neatly
encased and where it fits only too well and throw it among
other ideas of freedom, likewise torn from their philosophic
frames, to compare them with each other and with the general

1 Editor’s Note : A few of the essays in this volume arrived too late for
consideration in the Epilogue.

653

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context of fact and culture from which all ideas spring and to
which they should apply. Philosophers usually suffer under
such treatment and resent the intrusion of foreign ideas even
more than they do brute facts. Nevertheless I must pursue my
task.

One of the basic problems that face us here can be stated
quite simply. Can freedom be built into the framework of a
culture in such a way that the culture could be said to be struc-
turally free; or is freedom too fluid, living, or intangible to be
embedded in an institutional structure? The inquiry does not
appear altogether hopeless on the basis of the material here
assembled. For though it may be futile to approach scientific
precision and verifiability in so protean and passionate a subject,
even a novice can readily discover in these critical essays certain
distinctions and agreements that can be applied to the history
of cultures with some hope of enlightenment and some promises
of science in some future culture.

Perry, in his essay, has made a careful analysis of seven kinds
of freedom that serves admirably as a point of departure. It is
summarized in the following outline.

A. In relation to effective personal choice in the pursuit of an
interest,

1. Negative liberty is the absence of an external obstacle ;

2. Positive liberty is the presence of the necessary imple-
ments for attaining the end desired.

B. In relation to an interest’s claim to social recognition,

3. Primitive liberty is the material power of an interest to
assert itself in the face of others;

4. Moral liberty is the form of conscientiousness, either

a . Personal , the interests of an individual being cen-
tered and unified by a reflective will, or
b» Social y the interests of an individual embracing an
interest in the personal liberty of others, or
c . Culturaly the moral liberties of individuals being
institutionalized in the joint pursuit and enjoyment
of art and science, activities which are by nature
“disinterested” in the sense that they serve any
moralized interest.

HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER 655

C. In relation to government,

5. Legal liberty under government gives the maximum pos-
sible security to liberties 1, 2, 3, and 4.

6. Civil (or constitutional 2 ) liberty against government
gives security to liberties I, 2, 3, and 4 against abuse
b y 5*

7. Political liberty for government justifies civil liberties as
positive instruments of democratic government or demo-
cratic revolution.

Though these kinds of liberty are distinguished clearly and
significantly, they indicate at once that the most difficult prob-
lems arise in describing their interrelations. Liberties 4, 5, 6,
and 7 are evidently regulating devices for liberties 1, 2, and 3,
and, if I correctly interpret Perry’s argument, the liberties re-
lating to government (5, 6, and 7) can be regarded as forms of
cultural liberty (4 c) } so that they might appear strictly as cul-
tural forms of moral liberty, co-ordinate with art and science.
Such a formulation of the thesis at once begs many questions,
and I am compelled to begin the analysis afresh in order to do
justice to the various positions taken by other authors of this
volume concerning the relation of freedom to the cultural mor-
alizations of interests.

Many of our authors agree in regarding “freedom” and “lib-
erty” as synonyms, and in this I believe they are mistaken.
“Liberty” has a plural ; “freedom” has none. “A liberty” is
something particular and culturally identifiable. The discussions
of freedom usually take us into a philosophical or scientific con-
text ; the discussions of liberty, into the context of social rights
and institutions. This fact offers a convenient way of distin-
guishing between the attempts to conceive freedom in terms of
other basic concepts of analysis and the attempts to define par-
ticular liberties. I am inclined to think that there is intellectual
progress in advancing from the problem “Is there freedom?”
to the problem “What liberties are there?” And had I been
asked to write on freedom, I should have been tempted to make
a philosophy of history out of this distinction and to argue that
out of centuries of futile debate concerning the reality of free-

2 Cf. the distinction as developed by Corwin.

FREEDOM

656

dom there finally emerged, three centuries ago, not merely a
debate but a cultural crisis in the interests of establishing socially
certain specific liberties. Be this as it may in history, it seems
clear to me after reading this volume that philosophers, theo-
logians, and natural scientists can argue for or against freedom
endlessly without affecting free culture except by their mutual
tolerations, but that the institutionalization of particular liberties
is of crucial importance for both the practice and theory of free-
dom. With this end in mind I shall review successively the at-
tempts made to define freedom in terms of independence,
power, organic unity, choice, and the pursuit of happiness, sug-
gesting the cultural contexts of each of these doctrines. I shall
then discuss particular cultural liberties.

I. INDEPENDENCE

There is a temptation to conceive freedom in terms of self-
sufficiency. One is either dependent or independent, so runs the
argument, though gradually the idea of interdependence is be-
coming respectable. The belief in self-contained atoms in the
void was once regarded as the ideal starting point for mecha-
nistic analysis 3 now that the mechanists have become accustomed
to fields of force, stresses, and strains, the ancient “free-moving
bodies” are left in the hands of moralists who need a principle
of autonomy. Absolute political independence or sovereignty
scarcely raises its head in this volume, and its economic ana-
logue, autarchy, is conceived frankly not as an instrument of
freedom but of conflict. Similarly, the atomic individual of
economic science has practically disappeared, but Brandeis be-
lieves in, or at least shows nostalgia for, “financial independ-
ence” in a fairly literal sense as an essential of freedom, while
Bridgman argues that beneath the public level of conscience
and knowledge there is in each a consciousness that is absolutely
isolated within its own sensations. The mind is spontaneous,
self-determining, says Whitehead, and he regards this belief
as the permanent truth in Platonism. Conklin believes that evo-
lution reveals an increasing “freedom of response” on the part
of organisms to their environment, and Boas regards the break-

HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER 657

ing away of an individual from the cake of custom as the sign
of cultural freedom. There are these vestiges of faith in inde-
pendent beings. They are for the most part attempts to find
empirical illustrations of indeterminacy or relative independ-
ence, but at least some of these theories imply beyond indeter-
minacy a power of self-determination. 3 Variation and differen-
tiation exist abundantly in physical and social contexts 3 there is
no shortage of novelties. But are novelties spontaneous, and is
the individual autonomous? Is a mutation free because it is a
“sport”? To answer affirmatively proves too much, and Bridg-
man is quite right when he says: “The last thing that the av-
erage human being wants to be made to see is that as a matter
of fact he is already inescapably free.” Independence is not
worth much if it is merely negative and offers no particular
field of action. Admitting, to please Montague, that an infinity
of possibilities subsist in perfect independence, we still do not
know whether any freedom exists. The existence of a few meas-
urable probabilities has more meaning for freedom than the
subsistence of infinite possibilities which are not possibilities of
anything in particular. All freedom in a practical sense is con-
ditional, and to detach a body from all conditions makes it
homeless and powerless rather than free. This is true even of
the mind, as Gilson points out in refuting the idea of self-
determination.

There are those who believe on moral grounds that there
must be somewhere a “free agent” 4 but admit that they can
discover none in nature. They therefore bid us, as does Mari-
tain, free ourselves of nature by fixing our minds and hearts
steadfastly on God, who is by definition infinitely free, causa sui .
In one sense, possibly, the worship of perfect freedom might
be called an experience of freedom, but as it is usually reported
by the orthodox mystics, whose piety is less permeated with
romantic idealism than is Maritain’s, such devotion is an act
of complete surrender and yields a feeling of utter security

8 Cf. Demos.

4 “Free agent” is strictly speaking a contradiction in terms. In social rela-
tions an “agent” must be bound to an author or authority, and in a physical
context as well an agent is helpless without specific powers related to a dy-
namic field.

FREEDOM

65-8

rather than of freedom. Theologians seldom see this problem
from God’s point of view and do not take seriously the old
objection that a God with so many creatures hanging on him
could hardly be free or unconditioned. But . even from the
human point of view it seems a dubious liberty to love an
absolute judge who, as Spinoza points out, must be impartial
to be free and must therefore himself be beyond the bonds of
love. It is probably more than infantilism that prompts men
to believe in a Heavenly Father rather than in an Absolute
Other, for even mature love is not exactly free. No doubt there
is in complete dependence on the Unconditioned a sense of re-
lease and relief, an escape from both the contingencies and ne-
cessities of natural existence. One can become morally disem-
bodied while still in the flesh, but in the last analysis it is the
flesh that feels relief when the spirit comes to rest. It is not
“spiritual” freedom literally, for the spirit finds peace rather
than freedom, nor is it eternal, save for a brief time.

A similar short cut to freedom is to be found among the
scientists who, as Einstein puts it, seek freedom of the mind in
freedom from authority and prejudice. As a natural ideal in
the face of natural temptations this hope of freedom is intel-
ligible; but there is always the danger that the scientist, like
the theologian, permit his scientific ideals to blind him to his
natural limitations and social tools, imagining himself in a
world of pure freedom which is easier to feel than to find.

The cultural implications of the belief in radical independ-
ence are various, depending on whether independence is found
in the world or beyond it. To those for whom God or Truth
has a being independent of the temporal order of things, the
church, the laboratory, or the fountain pen exists as a refuge
for freedom of spirit, and they naturally insist that worship,
science, or philosophy should be free of interference from or
even concern with the affairs of this world. Freedom must have
its own institutions, which, though supported by the world, are
responsible only to God. Were these spiritual independents
content to be supernatural, they would probably not be dis-
turbed by their less fortunate neighbors, but they usually feel

HERBERT W, SCHNEIDER 659

spiritually free to “judge 55 the world, and the world naturally
takes revenge.

Those, on the other hand, who find independence in the
world are for the most part social pluralists rather than rugged
individualists. There are still occasional moral and epistemo-
logical individualists like Bridgman who imagine themselves
and their fellows as fixed stars, each solitary with his own
light in a dark moral heaven. “Future education, 55 Bridgman
writes, “will have to show the individual how to live in the
midst of his social isolation and ... to awaken a realization of
all the implications of intellectual isolation. 55 The “public level 55
of life, he explains, must be broken down so that we can
descend to the basic level of inexorable privacy, which alone
is certain, secure, and free. A few others may feel this need of
a mental and moral discipline for the solitariness that uncon-
sciously encompasses our consciousness, but those who do not
believe that they are living so near the terrifying freedom of
solipsism conceive independence in more social terms. Dewey
pins his faith on “voluntary associations, 55 and Whitehead gives
an example of such associations when he points to a profession
as an independent, self-regulating, social body and expresses the
belief that freedom will find institutional embodiment when
“society 55 is composed of such “societies, 55 each a competent, co-
operating unit, taking orders from no one and enforcing its own
discipline in view of its distinctive function. Such an ideal could
apply to churches, schools, unions, or, for that matter, to na-
tional and international organizations.

II. POWER

A more realistic or, at least, a more relativistic conception of
freedom is what Dewey calls “effective freedom. 55 Freedom is
the ability to perform or to understand 5 it is effective power. It
is usually defined negatively (for example, by Russell and
others) as absence of external obstacles. But mere absence of
obstacles might mean a mere automatic satisfaction of desire
or uninterrupted “free 55 motion 3 this is mechanism rather than
freedom. Freedom implies more than a smoothly running ac-

FREEDOM

660

tivi ty; it implies art, craft, skill, or the effective use of instru-
ments. Freedom means “knowing how” and opportunity to use
this knowledge without interference. Freedom to and freedom
from are contrasted frequently in this volume; taken together
they appear as the opposite poles of the same power. In the
fullest sense, freedom is not freedom from obstacles but free-
dom over them . 5 A free man, as Riezler and Wertheimer por-
tray him, is in productive harmony with his world, being able
to use language, norms, techniques of art, truths of science, and
natural resources; in short, he is “able.” Though freedom does
not necessarily imply the complete mastery of an art, it cer-
tainly implies freedom of growth. A tree or child is said to be
growing freely when its natural powers of development are not
stunted or shunted. Without a natural pattern of growth such
freedom would be indefinable. Freedom is measured in terms
of creation, growth, achievement of any sort. Even freedom of
the mind, as Birkhoff points out, is more than the integrity de-
fined by Einstein; it is positive resourcefulness of imagination,
effective guessing, faith in exploring. Croce and Tillich have
a similar idea when they point to history as the field of free-
dom; history is the course of human creativity. And creativ-
ity is purposely and wisely not defined except that it is “self-
determination,” a phrase which either begs the question or
raises the difficulties mentioned in the preceding section. A
man’s determinate self is what he becomes in history. Man is
free, not men; or, more accurately, a man is free in so far as
what he does is human history.

Such power includes, of course, power over others. The free
man is the master rather than merely the authority. His free-
dom is measured not by his right but by his ability to rule. The
greater the forces under control the more extensive the free-
dom. A master in one field may be a servant in another. Such
powers are many, and there need be no hierarchical structure
of freedom. Power is obviously neither mere energy nor mere
momentum; it is the art of using machinery (Millikan), and
this applies to social as well as to physical analysis. The danger
in social analysis, however, is that power is associated with

s Cf. especially Demos 5 discussion of power and choice .

HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER

66 1

authority or delegated responsibility. A power in the sense of an
office or responsibility may or may not be a form of freedom.
Similarly property, which is a type of power, may or may not
be liberating. Not legal privileges or “liberties” but actual en-
joyment of resources is what makes men free in this sense.

A free culture, accordingly, would be one in which human
1 energies are used most effectively, each person doing what he
can do best. Division of labor, responsibility proportionate to
capacity, knowledge, security, opportunity, abundance of re-
sources, tools, and skills — these would make for freedom. A
free man would govern by his foresight and counsel rather than
by coercion. Such government might be called democratic (as
by Perry and Dewey) because it would be enlightened and
would rest on the willingness of the governed to be led. A free
society would not necessarily imply freedom of each to share
in governing all. It would rather be the division of power anal-
ogous to the division of labor. There would be many govern-
ments corresponding to various forms of activity, and no class
or function could exercise sovereign power.

The exercise of freedom brings with it competition for power,
ambition, jealousy, and war. Republics have been notoriously
quarrelsome and have often sacrificed all for freedom. Free
society, in this sense, is not necessarily peaceful or tolerant. By
its very nature it often generates imperial power, and imperial
power usually becomes too great a burden to be borne freely.
When the exercise of power becomes a rich man’s burden, being
maintained in the face of growing obstacles, power ceases to be
a form of freedom and becomes coercive authority. The power
to use power productively is not a gift of nature, nor a dele-
gated office, but comes from discipline and experience. There-
fore such freedom implies maturity and reason. Tempering the
mind to nature and the will to art is the secret of freedom.

III. ORGANIC UNITY

The idealistic theory of freedom is that freedom is will gov-
erned by reason (cf. Brightman). Socially speaking this means
that a free man voluntarily co-operates with his fellows toward

662

FREEDOM

a common good. The achievement of a love of law, an inner
compulsion to obey the general will, an interest in interests in
general — these are the traits by which the free man is recog-
nized. Man wins his freedom by becoming incorporated. The
social contract is the classic myth expressing this conception.
Though not all who hold this view would subscribe to the or-
ganismic theory of society in all literalness, they at least agree
that freedom is organic and is to be found only socially, in vol-
untary co-operation. Maritain’s conception of the “conquest of
freedom,” though disguised in a Thomist garb, follows the gen-
eral idealistic pattern. Gerard commits himself explicitly to the
organic conception of both society and freedom, and this idea is
implied in the essays of Riezler and Wertheimer. This freedom
through law is the social analogue of the doctrine that scientific
freedom is “obedience to fact” (Gilson), and that facts constitute
a body of organic truth. It carries the idea of interdependence to
its extreme form, assuming a moral order in which differenti-
ated parts co-operate toward a unified end. Though some assume
that there is a biological social organism, the majority regard
the union as moral. It is a generalized form of “freedom of
contract” or “the liberty to alienate liberty” (Clark).

A culture is free, according to this view, when it is unified
not by force but by agreement. This emphasis on unity is criti-
cized by Maclver, Clark, and others; while Bergson, develop-
ing the idea of the unity of moral obligation, has shown that
such unity may be regarded as the very antithesis of freedom.

As the problem of freedom presents itself to most of the
authors of this volume, there is a recognition of the need for
differentiating between a free culture and a unitary one. For
though a highly integrated culture may be self-consistent, pow-
erful, and hence free, the freedom that is being sought is not
for the collectivity but for the members. Members of a body are
not free no matter how free the body as a whole may be; and,
except in war or other group struggles when the power of the
group is all-important, freedom to move within the group, in
spite of the group, or even against the group is what most
matters. It is true that a unified culture does not necessarily

HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER 663

imply a totalitarian state, for the State is usually one institution
among many and can be taught to co-operate with other insti-
tutions without dominating them. But the freedom of a culture
is best measured by the flexibility of its institutional structure.
Without making social life intolerable, institutions can be rela-
tively free of each other and can even compete instead of coher-
ing. And what is true of the relations between institutions in a
free culture is true of membership in a free institution. Uni-
versal co-operation is the most complete bondage.

IV. CHOICE

One of the commonest ideas is that where there is choice
there is freedom. Quite apart from the ancient dispute about
free choice and free will there is a very general agreement (cf.
Demos, Morris, et al .) that to have the opportunity of choosing
is to exercise freedom. If not any choice, certainly deliberate
choice is called “free determination,” and the use of intelli-
gence is commonly contrasted (especially by Dewey and Berg-
son) with habit, instinct, custom, and heredity as the essence of
freedom. Whitehead says when ideas become effective there is
freedom, and Gilson restates the classic doctrine that in so far
as man is governed by reason he is free. Clark defines economic
liberty as the opportunity of choosing among a variety of goods
in a market. Though the detailed analyses of the nature of
deliberation vary significantly, the general reason for regarding
it as free seems to be that the decision is made by factors inter-
nal to the situation instead of by external force, authority, law,
or accident. Some call it literally “self-government” (for ex-
ample, Ryan 5 others emphasize the determination by predic-
tion (for example, Dewey ) \ still others think that anything
done consciously is if so jacto free.

A free culture in these terms would give every person,
ideally, an opportunity to deliberate and decide in any matter
affecting his interests. This is usually identified with democracy.
Whitehead argues that cultural freedom dawned when man
undertook the deliberate reformation of his institutions. Many
have argued that in a free culture the government must reserve

FREEDOM

664

a large “field of liberty/’ that is, a field regulated by individual
choices, free markets, genuine alternatives.

It is not clear, however, just why the need for deliberation
should be identified with freedom. Being obliged to “stop and
think” is often an embarrassing predicament rather than an
opportunity. And even when welcome, the necessity of choosing
between alternatives is not if so jacto “free determination”; it is
often a genuine and external obstacle. Choice represents re-
sponsibility rather than freedom, and freedom from responsi-
bility is a very important kind of liberty. To be free to choose
is freedom indeed only when there is an interest in choosing,
when the alternatives are severally attractive and significant,
and when the implications of the alternatives are reasonably
clear. Blind choice is certainly not freedom, and useless delib-
erations are a nuisance. In general it is not choice itself that
gives freedom but important choices and wide range of oppor-
tunity. To know how to use intelligence may be freedom, but
to be compelled to use it may be an imposition or a flattery.

V. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

If we may believe some of the biologists, life itself is liberty,
and if we may believe some of the moralists, liberty is the
pursuit of happiness, but if the Declaration of Independence is
correct, there are three things, life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. However, the close association of liberty and the
pursuit of happiness throughout the Revolutionary tradition
raises the problem whether freedom is necessarily linked to
happiness.

Einstein points out what seems to be very generally believed,
that no one is free whose whole concern is with necessities.
Freedom begins with leisure, when working for a living leaves
a little time for living. Liberal arts are leisure arts not because
they exist for a leisure class and certainly not because the artists
have leisure but because they are both work and play. Leisure
does not necessarily nor even usually bring either freedom or
happiness, but without it happiness is slavish and freedom a
dream. Freedom in this sense, therefore, means freedom from

HERBERT W, SCHNEIDER 665

working for others or for other days, and positively it means
freedom for enjoying the fruits of labor.

The economists, too (cf. Clark), distinguish between formal
freedom and material freedom. Freedom of contract, for ex-
ample, is in many cases a legal fiction, and an “agreement”
nowadays is something to sign rather than something arrived
at mutually. Material freedom means the ability to satisfy
wants instead of the necessity of trimming one’s wants to fit
the market or the purse. Even purchasing power is not freedom
if what is purchased does not please. In this context, too, free-
dom is identified with satisfaction.

When freedom is so stretched as to include the enjoyment
of leisure and the satisfaction of wants, it is obvious that a free
culture must be a good one. Freedom thus becomes a normative
rather than a descriptive term, and criticism of freedom is made
impossible. If only the happy are free, our problem might
better be formulated in terms of happiness. Socrates, when con-
fronted in The Republic with the query* “But, Socrates, will
the just State be a happy State?” replied that the problem of
happiness could wait until the problem of justice had been
settled. Similarly it simplifies the analysis of freedom if the
problem of its value or its relation to happiness is temporarily
postponed.

Taken negatively, however, it seems true that freedom is
impossible where there is no pursuit of happiness. Slaves may
be happy, and emancipated persons often discover that their
freedom fails to bring happiness, but no one would call those
free who profess spirituality and practice indifference. Buddha,
Spinoza, and other hermits have attempted to find freedom
from desire by desiring only freedom from desire. In addition
to their verbal satisfactions they seem to have found peace of
mind in their amor intellectuals , but when they call this free-
dom, their neighbors usually are content with bondage. Free-
dom, in short, is not complete when it is merely freedom of the
mind. At least a culture is not free that disregards the pursuit
of happiness, for even philosophers and monks then abandon
it and look to heaven, or, in the case of the orthodox Buddhists,
to their navels.

666

FREEDOM

VI. LIBERTIES

Turning at last to those forms of freedom that imply defi-
nitely a legal context since they are claimed as rights and are
in fact called “rights” in all languages except English, we come
to that aspect of our subject which most closely concerns the
science of culture. These liberties are still occasionally called
“natural” rights, though the English who first appealed to their
“ancient” liberties thought of them as birthrights of English-
men in contrast to the burdens or impositions of feudalism,
monarchy, and Church. It is one of the ironies of history that
Monsignor Ryan should be one among the few authors in this
volume to defend “natural” (in the sense of “inherent”) rights,
and that the Declaration of Independence (to which, ironically,
he appeals) should declare that men are “endowed by their
Creator” with “certain inalienable rights.” Monsignor Ryan
notwithstanding, men do not exhibit the “dignity” that he
ascribes to them by nature but by morals. This distinction is
important for Kant, who recognized inherent worth not in na-
ture but through the moral law, and a similar distinction is
at least suggested by such deistic teaching as the Declaration of
Independence represents when it describes the Creator as a
Moral Governor who “endows” his subjects with rights. Prag-
matically the only point to the protracted controversy over
natural rights is the question of inalienability. And the chief
fear ecclesiastical writers usually reveal over what they now
call the “naturalistic” theory of rights arises from the assump-
tion that what the State hath given the State can take away.
As far as the authors of this volume are concerned, even the
most “naturalistic” of them do not assert that the giving and
taking of rights is by the State. They conceive rights as arising
in a social context or culture, but the State itself is a product
or at best only a piece of this more general cultural context.
The most useful distinction in this connection is not that be-
tween “natural” and “civil” rights, but between civil and con-
stitutional rights, a distinction brilliantly developed by Corwin.
The civil rights are what Madison called “private rights” as
distinguished from “public good” $ it is the proper business of

HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER 667

government to protect them. Constitutional rights, as Corwin
uses the term, are the claims and privileges citizens have against
their own government when it violates either their private
rights or the public good. The basic practical problem that con-
fronts the science of culture in this connection is whether it is
possible to discover cultural patterns in which civil and consti-
tutional liberties can maintain themselves when the government
fails them or even seeks to destroy them.

1. The first form of civil liberties is security . Montesquieu
gives the classic formulation of this idea (cited by Russell):
“The political liberty of the subject is a tranquillity of mind
arising from the opinion each person has of his safety. In order
to have this liberty, it is requisite the government be so con-
stituted as one man need not be afraid of another.” And, we
might add, need not be afraid of the police. Where there is
political liberty, only he who threatens the safety of others
need fear the police power j all others, though they may not
enjoy “tranquillity of mind,” should at least have tranquillity.
However, as Russell points out, governors too, among others,
must have safety. When governments are insecure, it is idle
to think of liberty. And this has a special bearing now on inter-
national insecurity. Whether Russell is right in arguing that
security for national governments is possible only under inter-
national government, the general proposition certainly holds
that where there is war both governments and citizens are in-
secure and hence no one has liberty. Before there can be liberty
there must be peace. This is easy to say, but it sounds like con-
signing liberty to heaven, where it will be useless. Nevertheless,
without waiting for the peace that passeth understanding, it is
conceivable that enough peace can be assured to enough peoples
to make security tangible. Such a state of equilibrium is far
from the glorious reign of liberty envisioned by the Enlighten-
ment and enshrined in New York Harbor 5 it is, as Whitehead
says, “a mean state,” itself none too secure and threatened from
the right and the left. It implies only enough economic equi-
librium and collective “dignity” to induce us not to attack each
other violently. Equilibrium may be regarded as a “normal”
state, but it is none the less a cultural achievement, not a state

FREEDOM

668

of nature, and is maintained with difficulty. The majority of
the readers of this book will no doubt take such “personal lib-
erty/ 5 as Wallace still calls it, for granted 5 they should be less
complacent, if they wish to have a proper appreciation of their
liberties, for such safety is obviously not inalienable and is daily
becoming more precarious. Under this head of personal security
belong certain elementary property rights. Profrietas in classic
tradition is theoretically inalienable, an extension of one’s per-
sonality. Locke’s theory that labor is the basis of property and
that property is therefore one’s very own continues this classic
tradition. There seems to be general agreement now, on the
contrary, that property is a privilege or liberty, a responsibility
or power for the administration of certain goods in a general
social context of production and administration. Though prop-
erty is not necessarily created by the State or even by law, it
is a form of social freedom or right, not a personal creation.
Its distribution and enjoyment, therefore, as an instrument of
personal security and liberty, is a more basic right than is secu-
rity of property. In sum, to be at liberty means, first of all, to
be out of jail, army or asylum, and this privilege is enjoyed
only by those, presumably, who do not menace their fellows
and who can administer their personal security.

2. There is a second sense, however, in which being out of
jail is a liberty. For it frequently happens that those who are
confined because they are dangerous have more security than
those at liberty. A prison relieves its inmates of all responsi-
bilities, opportunities, and choices. Though occasionally a man
voluntarily surrenders the burdensome responsibilities of so-
called liberty for the security of prison, there is one liberty that
remains even to the most insecure, the right to “move/ 5 to leave
the country. A state’s boundaries are different from prison walls
at least in this respect, that one is free to enter prison and to
leave the country, not vice versa. When even freedom to emi-
grate is denied, a country may become in effect a jail. Of course
one cannot leave a hospital or restaurant without paying one’s
bills, and no one would argue that a person ought to be free
to leave his country with all his property as though he owed
nothing. To assert on the other hand that one’s debt to one’s

HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER 669

country is so pervasive that one is never free to leave it is in
effect to imprison the citizen. For he is then ultimately at the
mercy of his government with not even the theoretical oppor-
tunity of choosing a country more to his liking. In other words,
the most elementary of the “constitutional” liberties is the right
to renounce citizenship, and this right is becoming increasingly
rare, some states even denying it in theory, most states making
it inoperative by erecting economic obstacles.

This suggests another form of constitutional liberty, namely,
limitation of debt. Imprisonment for debt has been generally
abolished, and some form of periodic cancellation of debts, both
public and private, is necessary, it seems, to maintain what we
have above called “equilibrium.” Slavery of the poor to the
rich, of the rich to the tax collectors, of the governments of poor
countries to the governments of rich countries, and of all men
to the devil, would be the inevitable fate of men under infinite
“justice.” A faint and strained quality of mercy is embedded
in the moral structure of free cultures, as exhibited in their
history, from the days of Solon to the New Deal.

The most important weapon of constitutional liberty, how-
ever, is “due process of law.” A government is at bottom a
power, a pressure group among other pressure groups. But at
best a government lives not by power alone but by the Word.
Persuasion, or, as it is often euphemistically called, “reason,” is
a form of control distinct from physical power. Law or court
procedure is intended to settle conflicts by dispute rather than
by display of force. To the extent that cultures provide oppor-
tunities for hearings and judgments on the basis of evidence,
they are free — free not because their governments are imper-
sonal (which is the classic theory) but because their powers
submit to judgment. As Brandeis, Gilson, and others point out
in this volume, the aim of law is to make men free of each
other’s power. When the courts themselves become powers or
dependents of powers, or when their decisions can be disre-
garded by the powers that be, there is no freedom in law. Ad-
ministrative law is sometimes called an instrument of freedom.
Some traffic regulations are obviously necessary, but regulated
traffic is not free except that it moves faster and more safely

FREEDOM

67O

than without regulation. To call regimented areas of life free
whenever regimentation is useful is to use the term “free” too
freely. If a red light stops me and lets you go, you are free
and I am not. All liberties are at the expense of other liberties
(cf, Maclver) ; that is what is meant by calling them cultural
rather than natural. Hence not all men can have the same lib-
erties 5 the most they can hope for are “equal,” “equitable,” or
“like” liberties. “Reciprocal liberties” would be a still better
term to denote the correlative nature of rights and duties. By
the “field of liberty” is usually meant what is free from gov-
ernment, and “freedom through law,” if it means anything
more than power or security or happiness through law, means
freedom from arbitrary government through just judgment.

3. There is a third group of liberties discussed in this volume
to which I shall give the name freedom of conscience — a term
that is scarcely used today, though it was once a battle cry of
freedom. For historical reasons, familiar to all, freedom of
conscience has been associated primarily with religious liberty,
and religious liberty has been narrowed down to the separa-
tion of Church and State. But taken seriously, freedom of
conscience is the most important issue underlying freedom
of speech, of press, of science, of teaching — those forms of
freedom for which the authors of this volume are evidently
most concerned. It is frequently pointed out that to give com-
plete freedom of speech, press, teaching, and preaching to all
who seek it would subject others to intolerable burdens of propa-
ganda, libel, misrepresentation, faction, and noise. Those who
claim liberty in these fields can expect toleration only if they
are conscientious. The scientist who competently communicates
discoveries in his science, the journalist who really reports news,
the preacher who condemns what he believes to be wrong, the
agitator who works for justice, have claims to liberty in so far
as these enterprises are important to the culture. A society that
respects science, conscience, and justice must give liberty to
them, because by their very nature they are intended to stir
up trouble where trouble is needed. There is not much differ-
ence of opinion on that score. The problematic cases are on the
border line. The scientist wants liberty to talk on anything be-

HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER 6j l

cause he is a “thinker,” and the writer believes whatever he
writes is literature. In certain literary, psycho-clinical, and re-
ligious circles freedom to tell all in public even before thinking
is regarded as not only a right but a duty. Conscience has so
many vagaries today that it seems possessed of little but free-
dom. Hence on the other side accusations are made of hypocrisy,
malice, incompetence, and subversiveness. Soon conscientious-
ness is buried under moral indignation. Under these circum-
stances it is evident that liberty itself must be regulated. To
prescribe the conditions under which conscience can breathe
freely is an exceedingly delicate task, for liberty complains of
suffocation the moment you touch her. It is usually a technical
problem rather than a moral one, if we may make so dubious
a distinction. Some of the essays in this volume make genuine
contributions to this task. Maclver at least states the problem
very clearly: “What combination of liberties and restraints is
most serviceable for the existence of what men seek when they
place a high value on liberty?” He continues: “but our imme-
diate concern is with” — something else. This, alas, is the sad
history of our problem. And I, too, must follow my colleagues
and turn to something else.

4. Several authors, notably Adams, Beard, Shotwell, and
Perry, point out that all attempts to preserve liberty structur-
ally or formally by legislation, bills of rights, leagues of na-
tions, are futile in the long run if there is no love of liberty.
And they bid us look to the means for preserving this love.
Stefansson and Whitehead both make the point that “advanced”
persons and societies are often the most illiberal. “Eternal
vigilance” is an ancient and bitter prescription, but it is fre-
quently recommended as the only reliable one. Shotwell re-
minds us that more than the love of liberty is needed: a love
of tolerance. “Only the generous are free.” Croce points out
very forcibly that it is difficult for some men or peoples to be
free when they are surrounded by neighbors who are not free.
Ryan has a similar idea when he says that freedom can be se-
cured only where there is a love of neighbor or brother. This
theme raises large issues: though difficult to answer, it is profit-
able to ask the question whether liberty is best gained by a love

FREEDOM

672

of liberty and by preaching that freedom is an end in itself, or
by a love of truth, art, neighbor, God, in the hope that the
love of liberty will be a by-product. Whether freedom be an
end in itself or a reward of virtue, it is apparently more cher-
ished than understood. And whether or not it be true that all
men are by nature free, nevertheless they continue to seek cul-
tural liberties that are difficult to achieve and precarious. Those
of us who still enjoy any two of these liberties should be thank-
ful and careful.

INDEX

Abelard (Gilson),- 154.

Abridgment of liberty (Stefansson),
387* 390

Absolute: freedom (Boas), 3805
(Einstein), 3825 immanentism
(Croce), 335 individuality (White-
head), 625 intellectualism (Mari-
tain), 632; value (Gilson), 161
Absoluteness (Whitehead), 42-43
Absolutism (Beard), 303
Abstract freedom (Adams), 104
Abstractions (Birkhoff), 2255
(Brightman), 486

Academic freedom (Johnson), 200-
015 (Perry), 272
Action (Macmurray), 512
Adaptive amplification (Gerard), 415
Aeschylus (Phelps), 435
Agag (Whitehead), 48
Agent (Demos), 600-01
Agreement, antecedent and independ-
ent, (Perry), 274
Akhenaton (Whitehead), 49
Alcuin (Gilson), 162
Alexander, Samuel, (Brightman) ,
495

Alexander the Great (Whitehead),
53> 61

Allen, G. C., (Hu Shih), 115
Alternative to freedom (Croce), 24,
25

Alternatives (Clark), 313
American: Constitution (Russell),
250 } Constitutional Law (Cor-
win), 86, 87, 895 constitutional-
ism (Corwin), 945 Declaration of
1774 (Salvemini), 333$ freedom
(Adams), 107-085 ideals (Bran-
deis), 3505 pragmatists (Riezler).
553; Revolution (Bernstein), 146
(Russell), 2565 (Shotwell), 14

standard of living (Brandeis) ,
350 - 5 *

Americanization (Brandeis), 349
Anarchism (Russell), 249
Anaxagoras (Brightman), 499
“Ancient” liberties (Schneider), 666
Anglo-American Common Law
(Whitehead), 63

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Beard), 302
Animorgs (Gerard), 412, 421
Ant (Bergson), 626, 628
Anticipation (Tillich), 143
Apathy (Kingdon), 209
Aquinas, Thomas, (Brightman), 500;
(Gilson), 1685 (Maritain), 641,
648

Arbitration (Shotwell), 17
Aristocracy (Brandeis), 353
Aristophanes (Phelps), 435
Aristotle (Brightman), 496; (De-
mos), 592, 6075 (Dewey), 368;
(Haldane), 451; (Phelps), 435;
(Riezler), 551; (Whitehead), 55
Armament (Shotwell), 16
Aspiration for freedom (Croce), 32
Aspirations of the person (Maritain)
644-46

Athapascans (Stefansson), 386

Atheism (Maritain), 645

Athens (Phelps), 435

Atom (Gerard), 415

Atomic individual (Schneider), 656

Atticus (Whitehead), 64

Augustine (Brightman) , 491;

(Whitehead), 53
Augustus (Whitehead), 53, 61
Autarchy (Haldane), 4545 (Schnei-
der), 656

Autonomy (Maritain), 639; of the
person (Maritain), 641-42; of the
rational being (Anshen), 6

INDEX

674

Bacon, Francis, (Phelps), 4325
(Whitehead), 58

Balance (Bernstein), 145 j (Conklin),
188

Ball, John, (Beard), 296
Barzun, Jacques, (Phelps), 433
Beethoven (Phelps), 430; (Riezler),
546

Behavior (Morris), 583-84
Being (Anshen), 6
Bellarmine, Cardinal, (Ryan), 479-
80

Bentham, Jeremy, (Maclver), 2815
(Russell), 260-61

Bergson, Henri, (Anshen), 65 (De-
mos), 602-035 (Maritain), 633
Berkeley, George, (Brightman), 491
Bill of Rights (Corwin), 975 (Shot-
well), 12, 135 (Tillich), 127
Biological : fraternity (Conklin) ,
1975 heredity (Dewey), 3725 in-
heritance (Conklin), 192
Bismarck (Croce), 265 (Shotwell),
14

Body: human, (Russell), 2625 politic
(Russell), 262
Bolshevism (Mann), 78
Bonham, case of, (Corwin), 93
Bosanquet, Bernard, (Maclver), 286
Bourgeoisie (Mann), 69
Boxer Uprising (Hu Shih), 119
Bracton (Corwin), 88-89
Brinton, Crane, (Beard), 294
British Constitution (Salvemini), 334
Brotherhood (Brandeis), 353
Bryce, James, (Shotwell), 12
Buddha (Hu Shih), 1205 (Schnei-
der), 665

Buddhism (Russell), 261
Bunyan, John, (Phelps), 435
Buridan’s ass (Demos), 601
Burke, Edmund, (Whitehead), 44
Business liberty (Clark), 306, 324

Caesar (Beard), 3025 (Whitehead),
54

Calderon, George, (Phelps), 433
Caligula (Russell), 261
Calvin (Whitehead), 50

Calvinistic concept of vocation
(Croce), 32

Cantor, Georg, (Birkhoff), 229
Capitalism (Haldane), 4565 (Til-
lich) ,136

Carlyle (Phelps), 429
Catholic Church (Salvemini), 345;
(Whitehead), 57

Catholic Encyclopedia (Salvemini) ,
33i

Caudwell (Haldane), 451
Causal determination (Riezler), 539
Causality (Demos), 5925 (Wert-
heimer), 560

Cause (Demos), 603, 6055 and effect
(Demos), 610

Cavour (Croce), 36; (Shotwell), 14
Cells, advanced, (Gerard), 4195
primitive, (Gerard), 419
Censorship (Haldane), 462
Centralized control (Hu Shih), 115-
16, 118

Change (Clark), 307, 3275 (Milli-
kan), 175

Charles II (Whitehead), 59
Chattel slavery (Beard), 291
Chaucer (Brandeis), 355
Children (Haldane), 4695 (Stefans-
son), 394 ” 95 ) (Wertheimer), 567
Chinese Renaissance (Hu Shih), 120
Choice (Brightman), 4875 (Clark),
308-095 (Demos), 590? (Mari-
tain), 630-345 (Morris), 582,
5845 (Schneider), 6635 freedom
of, (Boas), 3785 (Hu Shih), 121
Christian: democracy (Salvemini),
3315 faith (Beard), 2965 (Gil-
son), 1615 idea of freedom (Til-
lich), 126

Christianity (Mann), 73, 745 (Rus-
sell), 2615 (Ryan), 4835 (Til-
lich), 127

Christians (Whitehead), 54
Chromosomes (Conklin), 1965 (Wal-
lace), 438

Chronicle of St. Gall (Gilson), 1 56-
57

Chu-hsi (Hu Shih), 120
Chukchee (Boas), 377

INDEX

675

Church (Tillich), 126-275 Roman
Catholic, (Beard), 300
Cicero, v? (Corwin), 85, 86, 945
(Russell), 2505 (Whitehead), 53,
64

Citizenship (Schneider), 66 9
City of human rights (Maritain),
640, 642

Civil liberty (Corwin), 84, 99, 1035
(Perry), 269-725 (Schneider),
^55> 667

Civil rights (Corwin), 100
Class distinctions (Conklin), 197
Classless society (Haldane), 467
Claudius (Whitehead), 54
Cleisthenes (Shotwell), 22
Coke, Sir Edward, (Corwin), 88,
92-94

Common Law (Corwin), 89-915 of
England (Shotwell), 14
Common: men (Russell), 2635 P ur “
pose (Macmurray), 5195 sense
(Demos), 595-96
Communism (Mann), 77
Communist: dictatorship (Salvemini),
3415 doctrine (Salvemini), 3475
system (Croce), 38
Communist Manifesto (Salvemini),
347

Communistic anarchists (Stefansson),
397

Communists (Haldane), 449
Community (Macmurray), 5185
(Mann), 72

Completed perfection of form (Hu
Shih), 121-22

Comparison (Haldane), 447
Compulsion (Whitehead), 56
Comte, Auguste, (Mann), 71
Concentration of power (Tillich),
137

Concept: of freedom (Adams), 1125
(Croce), 335 of self (Riezler),
552

Concrete freedom (Adams), 104
Concreteness of universality (Croce),
34

Condition (Wertheimer), 569
Conditioned reflexes (Bernstein), 145,
149

Conditions (Schneider), 657
Conflict (Brightman), 5025 (Rus-
sell), 2595 of opinion (Bright-
man), 500

Conflicting ideas of freedom
(Adams), 105

Confucianism (Russell), 261
Confucius (Hu Shih), 120
Congress of Vienna (Russell), 257
“Connatural” aspirations of person-
ality (Maritain), 637
Conscience (Croce), 30, 315 (Mari-
tain), 6455 (Schneider), 670-71
Consciousness (Haldane), 451; of
restraint (Boas), 377
Consent (Perry), 274-75
Conservation of energy (Birkhoff),
233

Conservatism (Hu Shih), 122
Constant, Benjamin, (Mann), 68
Constantine the Great (Whitehead),
49

Constitution: of the United States
(Beard), 2895 (Shotwell), 125 of
the Graduate Faculty of Political
and Social Science (Johnson), 204
Constitutional : development (Cor-
win), 895 freedom (Tillich), 1345
liberty (Corwin), 84, 99, 1035
(Schneider), 669

Constraint (Birkhoff), 2435 (Mac-
murray), 512

Consumers (Clark), 318, 322-23
Contact, freedom of, (Hu Shih), 12 1
Contract (Whitehead), 62
Contracts (Clark), 318
Contractual freedom (Whitehead), 61
Contradiction (Perry), 275-76
Control (Brandeis), 3525 (Morris),
586

Cooley, Thomas M., (Corwin), 88
Co-operation (Brandeis), 3525
(Dewey), 373-745 (Gerard), 4265
(Macmurray), 5 195 (Russell),
2625 (Schneider), 6625 (Wert-
heimer), 56 85 economic, (Clark),
3195 voluntary, (Clark), 318
Co-operative statesmanship (Shot-
well), 12

Corporate actions (Whitehead), 63

INDEX

676

Correlation of contemporary knowl-
edge (Anshen), 5
Corsairs (Russell), 252
Coughlin, Father, (Shot well), 19
Council of Nicaea (Whitehead), 52
Cranmer, Thomas, (Shotwell), 23
Creativity (Schneider), 6605 auton-
omous, (Tillich), 132, 1385 mean-
ingful, (Tillich), 131-32, I37> po-
litical, (Tillich), 129-130; self-
fulfilling, (Tillich), 133, 142
Crisis of liberalism (Croce), 25-26
Criticism (Hu Shih), 1205 (Shot-
well), 20

Cromwell, Oliver, (Russell), 259
Crusades (Croce) , 40
Cultural; change (Hu Shih), 120,
1215 conditions (Dewey), 371 ;
diffusion (Hu Shih), 1215 free-
dom (Bernstein), 1495 institutions
(Wertheimer), 567 5 readjustment
(Hu Shih), 1 1 5-1 6 ; transforma-
tion (Hu Shih), 1 1 6, 12 1
Culturally uniform society (Boas),
37<5

Culture (Dewey), 362, 370-725

(Schneider), 653
Custom (Boas), 378
Customary restrictions (Haldane) ,
449

Dante (Brightman), 5005 (Hal-
dane), 4545 (Riezler), 5445 (Rus-
sell), 262

Darwin (Johnson), 200
Darwinian hypothesis (Beard), 290-
91

Darwinism (Croce), 36
Debt (Schneider), 669
Decadence of the liberal idea
(Croce), 24

Declaration of Independence (Beard),
293, 2975 (Dewey), 3605 (Ryan),
478-795 (Schneider), 666
Declaration of the Rights of Man
(Beard), 297

Deficit financing (Clark), 317
Definition; of Freedom (Tillich),
1245 of History (Tillich), 1245

of human nature (Tillich), 1245
of Man (Tillich), 124
Definitions (Brightman), 487
De LauMbus Legum Angliae (Cor-
win), 90-91

Democracy (Brandeis), 3535 (Conk-
lin), 198; (Mann), 69, 74 >

(Maritain), 640 } (Morris), 5 88;
(Perry), 273; (Salvemini), 329-
30 } (Shotwell), 13; (Tillich),
1345 135

Democratic and oligarchic institu-
tions (Salvemini), 333-39
Democratic: constitution (Salvemini),
336} doctrine (Salvemini), 335;
equality (Conklin), 194; socialism
(Clark), 324

Dependence (Maritain), 647
Depressions (Clark), 322
De Republica Anglorum (Corwin),
92

Descartes (Whitehead), 58
Descent (Conklin), 195
Desire for freedom (Dewey), 359
Determination (Gerard), 417
Determinism (Demos), 597; (Mac-
murray), 507-09; (Ryan), 477;
(Wertheimer), 561-62
Determinist (Ryan), 475-76
Deterministic theory (Birkhoff), 236
Deuteronomy (Brightman), 495
Dewey, John, (Brightman), 496,
(Morris), 588-89; (Ryan), 479
Dialectic and dynamic (Hu Shih),
1 15, 121

Dichotomy of meaning (Bridgman),
53°

Dictatorial institutions (Salvemini),
339-41

Dictatorship (Macmurray), 516-17
Diderot (Anshen), 5
Dies Committee (Shotwell), 19
Diet (Stefansson), 385-86
Differentiation (Boas), 376-77 ;

(Brandeis), 354; (Dewey), 373
Dignity of personality (Ryan), 478
Direction (Clark), 308
Disarmament (Shotwell), 16-17
Disproportionate culture (Bernstein),
147

INDEX

677

Divine: right (Beard), 2975 tran-
scendence (Maritain), 638-39
Division of labor (Einstein), 383
Driesch, Hans, (Brightman), 487
Due process of law (Beard), 2895
(Corwin), 93, 99; (Russell), 2505
(Schneider), 66 9
Dumoyer (Mann) , 71
Dutch Republic (Whitehead), 50
Duty (Shotwell), 20
Dynamical social process (Birkhoff),
238

Economic: conditions (Dewey), 367;
considerations (Dewey), 3675 free-
dom under socialism (Clark), 322-
23 5 interpretation of history
(Croce), 385 liberalism (Croce),
375 (Tillich), 144; relations
(Maritain), 643 $ restrictions (Hal-
dane), 449

Eddington, Sir Arthur, (Birkhoff),
234-35

Edict of Nantes (Russell), 250
Education (Brandeis), 3515 (King-
don), 218-195 (Russell), 259
Educational reformers (Russell), 252
Ego (Bergson), 617-18
Einstein (Birkhoff), 234
Electromagnetic theory (Birkhoff),

23 1

Emancipation (Shotwell), 22
Emergency Powers Act (Haldane),
467

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, (Birkhoff),
224

Emotions (Dewey), 364
Empiricists (Maritain), 632
Employees (Corwin), 84
Employers (Clark), 319, 3275 (Cor-
win), 84

Employment (Millikan), 177
Encyclopedic synthesis (Anshen), 4
End (Anshen), 7; (Perry), 275-765
libertarian, (Perry), 27 6
Ends (Adams), 1055 (Riezler), 5415
(Russell), 260
Engels (Haldane), 451
English: philosophy (Croce), 335
Prayer Book (Shotwell), 23

Entente (Shotwell), 17
Environment (Adams), 1115 (Ger-
ard), 4185 (Wallace), 439-42
Epictetus (Beard), 295
Epicureans (Tillich), 126
Epiorganism (Gerard), 420, 4225
controls (Gerard), 423
Equality (Conklin), 191-925 (Mann),
74 , 75 i (Ryan) , 482
Equilibrium (Schneider), 6675 (Shot-
well), 19

Erasmus (Whitehead), 50, 57-58
Eskimo (Boas), 375
Eskimos (Stefansson), 3865 Corona-
tion Gulf, (Stefansson), 392
Esoterism (Tillich) : artificial, 1395
dictatorial, 1415 educational, 140;
mystical, 1395 natural, 139, 1415
political, 140 j revolutionary, 141-
42

Essence (Demos), 607
Ethics (Russell), 260
Etymology (Brightman), 490
Euclid (Montague), 575
Eudaimonia (Tillich), 133
Euripides (Phelps), 435
European: nationalities (Wallace),
4425 stocks (Wallace), 442-43
Evolution (Conklin), 187-88
Evolutionism (Croce), 36
Exoterism, democratic, (Tillich), 142
Experience (Bridgman), 5265
(Brightman), 492
Experimentation, free social,

(Clark), 324

External influences (Wertheimer),

5 %

Faith (Birkhoff), 2325 (Tillich),
142

Faraday (Birkhoff), 233
Fascism (Mann), 775 (Russell),
2535 (Salvemini), 339
Fascist dictatorship (Salvemini), 341
Fatalism (Demos), 598
Federation (Kingdon), 217
Feud (Stefansson), 403
Feudal system (Bernstein), 147
Feudalism (Whitehead), 57
Feuerbach (Brightman), 492

INDEX

678

Fichte (Brightman) , 4925
(Maritain), 645
Fields of freedom (Haldane), 448
Finance (Haldane), 457
Financial independence (Brandeis) ,
35 *

Food Stamp Plan (Wallace), 440
Fortescue, Sir John, (Corwin), 89-90
Founders of the Republic (Brandeis),
34-9

Founding Fathers (Dewey), 363, 372
Fourteenth Amendment (Corwin),
99-101 5 (Ryan), 480
Francis Joseph (Shotwell), 14
Francis, Saint, (Russell), 262
Fraternity (Maritain), 643-445
(Ryan), 483

Fraulk, Hans, (Salvemini), 347
Frederick the Great (Johnson), 200
Free: competition (Perry), 2715
contact (Hu Shih), 1215 cul-
ture (Schneider), 6635 determina-
tion (Schneider), 6645 economic
system (Clark), 3215 speech (Rus-
sell), 2545 trade (Croce), 37; will
(Macmurray), 5075 (Maritain),

632-33

Freedom (Haldane), as a capitalist,
4565 as a consumer, 4545 as a
producer, 455 ; to communicate
ideas and statements, 458-64
Freedom above history (Tillich), 125
Freedom: of conscience (Schneider),
670-715 of movement (Haldane),
451-54; of opinion (Russell),
2565 of the mind (Schneider),
6605 of the press (Haldane), 462;
of will (Montague), 5785 (Ryan),
475-76; (Tillich), 124; of women
and children (Haldane), 469-70
Freedom-purpose- value (Brightman) ,
49^-99? 5<H-o6

French Constituent Assembly (Salve-
mini), 333-34

French Revolution (Bernstein), 146-
47

Freud (Maritain), 632-33
Freyer (MacXver), 287
Friendship (Macmurray), 519

Frontier (Adams), 107, 109
Fuller, Thomas, (Conklin), 193-94

Galba (Whitehead), 54
Galen (Whitehead), 59
Galileo (Whitehead), 58
Garibaldi (Shotwell), 14
Gelasian Sacramentary (Shotwell),
23

Genes (Conklin), 192; (Wallace),
43*

Genetics (Wallace), 437
Genotypes (Haldane), 450
Gentile, Giovanni, (Maclver), 287
German Empire, before the war of
1914-18, (Salvemini), 334-35
German philosophy (Croce), 35, 36
Gestalt quality (Wertheimer), 569
Giaours (Russell), 252
Gibbon, Edward, (Whitehead), 64
Gilbert and Sullivan (Russell), 255
Goals (Einstein), 382
God (Demos), 598; (Maritain),
636, 639, 642; (Schneider), 658;
(Tillich), 126; (Whitehead), 54
Godel (Birkhoff), 230
Goering, Hermann, (Salvemini), 346
Goethe (Mann), 69, 70, 72;

(Phelps), 434
Gospel (Gilson), 168
Government (Perry), 269-705 (Rus-
sell), 263-64; (Schneider), 661;
interference (Adams), 107; (Cor-
win), 101 ; (Perry), 2715 mecha-
nisms of, (Perry), 271
Greek: citizen (Tillich), 125; city
states (Whitehead), 54; liberty
(Stefansson) , 388, 406
Greeks (Stefansson), 388
Greenland Eskimos (Stefansson), 396
Gregory XVI (Salvemini), 345
Grotius, Hugo, (Corwin), 95
Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of,
(Shotwell), 17

Habeas Corpus (Russell), 250
Habits (Bergson), 613, 616, 620,
627

Hamilton, Alexander, (Beard), 289,
3025 (Corwin), 86

INDEX

Happiness (Tillich), 143
Hapsburg (Shotwell), 15
Harmony (Boas), 376
Hauptmann, Gerhart, (Phelps), 431
Hebrew: God (Croce), 36; prophets
(Whitehead), 49
Redone (Tillich), 133
Hegel (Brightman), 496, 500;

(Croce), 345 (Haldane), 4515
(Maclver), 2865 (Maritain), 6385
(Ryan), 481
Heine (Mann), 71, 75
Hellenic wisdom (Maritain), 646
Hellenism (Whitehead), 63
Henry, Patrick, (Perry), 2675 (Shot-
well), 11

Heraclitus (Brightman), 5025 (Riez-
ler), 548

Heredity (Conklin), 1925 (Wallace),
438

Herodotus (Beard), 294
Heroin (Haldane), 454
Hervey (Whitehead), 58
Heterozygous population (Wallace),
443

Hilbert (Birkhoff), 230
Hideyoshi (Hu Shih), 122
Hindu spirituality (Maritain), 646
Historic position of freedom (Bern-
stein), 150-51

Historical: change (Tillich), 1235
freedom (Tillich), 127, 130, 133,
135, 138; predestination (Tillich),
1295 self-determination (Tillich),
130

Historicism (Croce), 33
History (Croce), 295 (Schneider),
660; (Tillich), 124-25
Hitler, Adolf, (Russell), 2585
(Salvemini), 347
Hobbes, Thomas, (Maclver), 281
Hohenzollern (Shotwell), 15
Homer (Riezler), 544
Hoover, Herbert, (Maclver), 282-
83 > (Phelps), 4.31
Housing (Stefansson) , 398-99
Human: authority (Corwin), 86;
idealism (Beard), 298; nature
(Beard), 290-92; (Dewey), 3 66-
67, 369-70

679

Humanity (Beard), 293
Hume, David, (Demos), 599, 604,
609

Humility (Salvemini), 348
Hunger (Macmurray), 517
Huxley, Thomas H., (Johnson), 200
Huyghens (Birkhoff), 233
Hyde, Walter W., (Stefansson), 384,
387-88, 411

Hymenopterae (Bergson), 628

Ideal of freedom (Croce), 26
Idealism (Gilson), 167; (Tillich),
129

Idealist conception of science (Mari-
tain), 645
Ideas (Corwin), 88
Ideas, theory of, (Bergson), 615
Illusion of nominalism (Montague),
573 ) 577-78

Illusory: constraints (Macmurray),
511-12; freedom (Macmurray),
5io

Imagination (Dewey), 364
Immanentist conception of conscience
(Maritain), 645
Immigrant (Brandeis), 349-50
Imperial Reichstag (Salvemini), 335
Impossible possibility (Macmurray),
5i3

Impulse to tyranny (Russell), 252
Independence, freedom of, (Mari-
tain), 630-39; (Schneider), 656-57
Indeterminacy (Gerard), 417, 427
Indeterminism (Demos), 601-05;

(Wertheimer), 561
Individual: Absoluteness (White-

head), 42, 43; initiative (Boas),
379; Relativity (Whitehead), 42,
43; the, (Croce), 34
Individualism (Gilson), 169; (White-
head), 5 7 ^

Industrialization (Hu Shih), 117-18
Infinite classes (Birkhoff), 229
Infringement on liberty (Stefansson),
406, 410

Inherent justice of the Universe (Cor-
win), 85

Inheritance (Mann), 72; (White-
head), 63

INDEX

680

Innovation (Clark), 310
Inquisition (Russell), 255
Instinct (Bergson), 626-285 (White-
head), 46

Instinctual impulsions (Wertheimer),
568

Institutions (Schneider), 6635 (Shot-
well), 21

Integration (Gerard), 422
Intellectual freedom (Phelps), 435
Intelligence (Bergson), 624, 6285

(Whitehead), 46, 47
Interaction (Boas), 3795 (Dewey),
37i

Interdependence of natural and po-
litical freedom (Tillich), 128
Internal: life (Maritain), 6435 re-
strictions on freedom (Haldane),
449-50

Internalization of external compul-
sion (Wertheimer), 559
International: anarchy (Russell),

2585 authority (Russell), 2575
government (Russell), 258
Intuition (Birkhoff), 226-27
Inward freedom (Einstein), 383
I.Q. test (Wallace), 440
Isolation (Dewey), 3745 (Schnei-
der), 659

James, William, (Brightman), 504-
055 (Demos), 6025 (Riezler), 55 2
Japanese (Hu Shih), 122
Jefferson, Thomas, (Adams), 105,
1095 (Beard), 299-3005 (Dewey),
361, 3635 (Perry), 2705 (Ryan),
4795 (Salvemini), 343
Jesuits in Japan (Hu Shih), 122
Jesus Christ (Beard), 296
John of Salisbury (Corwin), 875
(Gilson), 159

Judges, Book of, (Gilson), 164
Judgment (Montague), 574
Judicial review (Corwin), 97-98,
102

Juridical restraint (Corwin), 84, 98,
102

Jus gentium (Beard), 295
Justice (Shotwell), 18, 21

Kant (Bergson), 6225 (Brightman),
489, 490, 493, 4965 (Demos),

595> 599> 6oo > 6 ° 4 > ( Mac-
mu r ray) , 5 n 5 (Maritain) , 6415
(Montague), 5725 (Ryan), 4785
(Schneider), 666
Knowledge (Perry), 273
Koehler, Wolfgang, (Brightman) ,

485

Kronecker (Birkhoff), 229
Kropotkin (Russell), 249

Labor (Millikan), 1795 theory of
value (Corwin), 96-97
Labor and production (Maritain),
643

La Bruyere (Bernstein), 147
Lachelier, Jules, (Gilson), 164
Ladd, William, (Ryan), 477
Language (Bergson), 629; (Bridg-
man), 5285 (Brightman), 489-915
(Riezler), 544

Lao-tse (Hu Shih), 1205 (Russell),
252-53

Laski, Harold, (Beard), 295 n.
Lauer, H. E., (Gilson), 153
Law (Beard), 2895 (Corwin), 915
(Maclver), 281-835 (Russell),
256; of thermodynamics (Milli-
kan), 1745 of transcendental obli-
gation (Corwin), 95
Leadership (Clark), 308
Lederer, Emil, (Hu Shih), 1x7
Legal freedom (Croce), 38
Legal: liberty (Perry), 2685 (Schnei-
der), 655 j restrictions (Haldane),
448, 452

Legislative supremacy (Corwin), 98
Legislature (Corwin), 103
Leibnitz (Demos), 6025 (White-
head), 58

Leisure (Brandeis), 35x5 (Schnei-
der), 664

Lenin (Riezler), 551
Leonardo da Vinci (Whitehead), 59
Les Miserables (Phelps), 436
Lessing, G. E., (Bernstein) , 1515
(Croce), 35

Ley, Robert, (Salvemini), 347
Libel (Haldane), 461

INDEX 68 1

Liberal ideal (Croce), 24, 31, 36
Liberalism (Croce), 37
Libertarianism (Perry), 276
Liberty (Croce), 385 (Salvemini),
332-335 (Schneider), 6555 against
Government (Corwin), 1025 ap-
parent, (Maclver), 286; in the in-
dividualistic scheme (Clark), 317-
225 real, (Maclver), 2865 univer-
sal use of, (Maclver), 279-805
versus government (Corwin), 88
Limitation of freedom, voluntary,
(Mann), 82

Lincoln, Abraham, (Bernstein), 1455
(Conklin), 191

Lindsay, Vachel, (Phelps), 434
Literature (Croce), 415 (Phelps),

429

Locke, John, (Corwin), 95-965 (Bus-
sell), 2505 (Schneider), 6685
(Shotwell), 135 (Whitehead), 50
Long, Huey, (Shotwell), 19
Louis XIV (Bernstein), 147
Love (Macmurray), 5175 (Mari-
tain), 647, 6495 of liberty (Schnei-
der), 671-72

Lovers of freedom (Wertheimer),
566

Lucian (Whitehead), 54
Lucretius (Whitehead), 53
Luther, Martin, (Whitehead), 50, 58

Machine, the, (Millikan), 177
Madison, James, (Corwin), 97
Magna Charta (Corwin), 88-895
(Shotwell), 13-14
Magnanimity (Shotwell), 19
Maladjustment (Shotwell), 21
Man (Anshen), 3, 45 (Corwdn), 855
(Maritain), 6395 (Tillich), 125
Manasseh, King, (Brightman), 495
Marcus Aurelius (Beard), 2955
(Russell), 261

Marriage (Haldane), 4575 (Stefans-
son), 395

Marx, Karl, (Brightman), 4925
(Russell), 262

Marxian economic freedom (Bern-
stein), 150

Marxian socialism (Croce), 26

Marxist Hegelianism (Maritain),
645-46

Mason, George, (Shotwell), 11
Mass society (Tillich), 137
Masses, the, (Croce), 28
Mazzini (Salvemini), 3305 (Shot-
well), 14

Mead, George H., (Morris), 584
Meanings (Perry), 265
Means (Anshen), 75 (Riezler), 541
Mechanism of freedom (Morris),
579 > 585

Mechanisms (Morris), 585
Medieval: rationalism (Gilson), 166;

universalism (Gilson), 169
Meiji Reformation (Hu Shih), 117
Meliorists (Brightman), 494
Metaphysics (Brightman), 499
Metternich (Shotwell), 14
Micah (Phelps), 432-33
Middle Ages (Corwin), 87, 885 (Gil-
son), 1625 (Tillich), 141
Militarism (Hu Shih), 119
Militaristic caste (Hu Shih), 118
Militarization (Hu Shih), 118
Mill, John Stuart, (Birkhoff), 226-
275 (Croce), 345 (Demos), 5995
(Maclver), 2815 (Phelps), 4285
(Salvemini), 344-45
Milton (Whitehead), 51
Mind (Gilson), 168
Minorities (Salvemini), 336
Mirabeau (Bernstein), 148
Modern democracy (Tillich), 127
Modernization (Hu Shih), 114
Monarchist (Salvemini), 346
Monarchy (Hu Shih), 1215 (Til-
lich), 135

Montesquieu (Russell), 2505 (Salve-
mini), 3325 (Schneider), 667
Moore, E. H., (Birkhoff), 230
Moore, G. E., (Demos), 598
Moral: attitude (Morris), 586-875
choice (Demos), 600-015 equality
(Beard), 293-945 factor (Dewey),
3655 freedom (Demos), 6005 ideal
(Croce), 30, 34, 35} laws (Dew-
ey), 360-615 liberalism (Croce),
375 liberation (Croce), 325 liberty
(Perry), 2675 (Schneider), 654

INDEX

682

Morality (Croce), 40; (Mann), 72;
(Morris), 586-88-, of the closed
society (Bergson), 617, 629
Morals (Dewey), 368
Mozart (Riezler), 545
Multicellular organisms (Gerard),
4x9-20

Mussolini (Salvemini), 346

Napoleon I (Beard), 303
Napoleon III (Beard), 3035 (Shot-
well), 14

Napoleonic wars (Mann), 69
National security (Shotwell), 15-16
National Socialism, German, (Mann) ,
77-78 .

Nationalism (Brandeis), 354; (King-
don), 212-13; (Russell), 257;
(Shotwell), 13; (Tillich), 136
Native individual differences (Dew-
ey), 372

Natural: freedom (Tillich), 127-28;
law (Corwin), 94, 95; right

(Beard), 297; Rights (Corwin),
xoo-oi ; (Ryan), 479
Nature (Bergson), 615; (Bright-
man), 502; (Riezler), 554; of
freedom (Tillich), 123; of man
(Corwin), 96

Nazi: despotism (Shot-well), 14; dic-
tatorship (Salvemini), 341; sys-
tem (Bernstein), 149
Necessity (Bergson), 615, 616-17,
630

Neff, Walter S., (Wallace), 440
Negation of the transcendental
(Croce), 33

Negative freedom (Riezler), 540 ;

(Wertheimer), 565
Negative liberty (Perry), 265-66;
(Schneider), 654

Neglect of freedom (Brightman),
493

Nero (Russell), 261; (Whitehead),
54

Nerve cell (Gerard), 414
Newton (Birkhoff), 232-33
Nexus : of communal relationship
(Macmurray), 523; of personal
relations (Macmurray), 512-15

Nietzsche (Dewey), 370
Nominalistic illusion (Montague),

571 \
Nonintervention (Croce), 39

Norms (Riezler), 543, 545-46

Obedience (Bergson), 621
Obligation (Bergson) : binding char-
acter of, 616-17; composite, ,620-
215 definition of, 622; deriving
from habits, 623; pressure of,
624; relation to instinct, 629-30
Operation of signs (Morris), 584-85
“Org” (Gerard), 412, 417, 420,
421; changes (Gerard), 424
Organic: conception of society and
freedom (Schneider), 662; unity
(Schneider), 661-63
Organism (Bergson), 612-14, 616,
629-30; (Conklin), 189; (Ge-
rard), 412

Organizations (Russell), 253
Organized minority (Salvemini),
336-38

“Original Contract” (Whitehead) ,
55

Orthodox mystics (Schneider), 657

Pareto (Bernstein), 146
Parliament (Corwin), 89
Parliamentary government (Hal-
dane), 466

“Parties,” political, (Salvemini), 336
Partisan liberty (Perry), 275
Pascal (Russell), 262
Paul, Saint, (Conklin), 189; (White-
head), 53-54

Peace (Schneider), 667
Penn, William, (Gilson), 164
Pericles (Whitehead), 50, 55
Periods of suppressed liberty (Croce),
29

Personal: conflicts (Boas), 378;
equality (Macmurray), 523-24;
liberty (Clark), 306, 325; (Mac-
Iver), 284-85; rights (Salvemini),
3335 (Shotwell), 12
Personalism (Gilson), 169
Personality (Maritain), 635, 636;
aspirations of, (Maritain), 637

INDEX

683

Persuasion (Brightman), 505-06
Perversion (Maclver), 284.-87
Pessimism (Croce), 26-27
Petition of Right (Shotwell), 12
Philosophical unity (Gilson), 163
Philosophy (Croce), 415 (Demos),
61 1 5 (Tillich), 143
Philosophy: of democracy (Salve-
mini), 342-483 of dictatorship
(Salvemini), 345
Physical freedom (Russell), 251
Physicalism (Brightman), 485
Physics (Riezler), 539
Pico della Mirandoia (Anshen), 7
Pilgrims (Beard), 296
Pitt, William, (Whitehead), 44
Plato (Anshen), 73 (Brightman),
496, 5005 (Demos), 599-600;

(Montague), 572, 5753 (White-
head), 50, 51, 55, 62, 67
Platonic: Eros (Whitehead), 65;

Realism (Montague), 578
Planck (Birkhoff), 232
Pliny (Whitehead), 54
Poetry (Phelps), 434
Policraticus (Corwin), 87
Political: authority (Corwin), 873
enslavement (Tillich), 1263 free-
dom (Dewey), 3613 (Haldane),
464-673 (Tillich), 126-28, 1343
liberty (Perry), 2743 (Russell),
250-51; (Schneider), 6553 revo-
lution (Hu Shih), 1 1 9-20 3 se-
curity (Shotwell), 173 self-deter-
mination (Tillich), 130
Pope Pius XI (Ryan), 483, 4843
(Salvemini), 346

Pope Pius XII (Birkhoff), 223;

(Salvemini), 345
Positive freedom (Riezler), 540
Positive liberty (Perry), 2663
(Schneider), 654
Potentiality (Demos), 592
Power (Corwin), 1023 (Demos),
605-06, 6083 (Dewey), 369-70;
(Millikan), 175, 1793 (Russell),
259; (Schneider), 659-661
Practical judgments (Demos), 590-
93

Predictability (Morris), 580

Prestige (Bernstein), 147-49
Price, Richard, (Salvemini), 333
Prices (Clark), 320; (Stefansson) ,
4.04

Primitive: cultures (Boas), 3793 lib-
erty (Perry), 266-673 (Schneider),
6543 society (Boas), 380
Private: property (Stefansson), 4043
(Whitehead), 623 rights (Cor-
win), 95-96

Problems of philosophy (Wert-
heimer), 567-68
Process (Riezler), 542-43
Professional institutions (Whitehead),
59

Professions (Whitehead), 59
Progress (Adams), 110-113 (Bern-
stein), 145-46; (Macmurray), 522
Proletarian dictatorships (Croce), 39
Property (Schneider), 6683 right
(Corwin), 99; (Johnson), 2003
systems (Croce), 37
Proprietarian interests (Corwin), 99
Profrietas (Schneider), 668
Prostitution (Haldane), 457, 458
Protestantism (Beard), 296; (Til-
lich), 127

Proudhon (Maritain), 638
Psychoanalysis (Maritain), 632-33
Public and private levels (Bridgman) ,
533

Public interest (Russell), 263
Punishment (Stefansson), 403
Puritan Christianity (Beard), 297
Puritan Revolution (Beard), 297
Puritanism (Bernstein), 149
Purpose (Brightman), 488-89, 5013
(Gerard), 425-26

Pursuit of happiness (Schneider),
664-65

Pythagoras (Birkhoff), 2233 (Mon-
tague), 572

Pythagorean theorem (Birkhoff), 228

Quakers (Whitehead), 50
Quantum mechanics (Birkhoff), 231-
32

Racial: equality (Brandeis), 353;
stock (Wallace), 442

INDEX

684

Racism (Wallace), 445
Radio (Haldane), 462
Radioactivity (Millikan), 179
Rational freedom (Brightman), 497-

98

Rationalism (Demos), 5945 (Gil-
son), 166

Reaction (Adams), 106, 108
Real freedom (Croce), 385 (Mac-
murray), 510-11
Realism (Gilson), 166, 169
Reality (Gilson), 168; (Riezler),
54-9

Reason (Anshen), 7$ (Bergson),
625-26; (Brightman), 496-97;
(Corwin), 85; (Gilson), 166-67
Relation (Riezler), 543-46
Religion (Adams), 112; (Mac-
murray), 524; (Ryan), 478, 481;
(Tillich), 129, 143; of freedom
(Croce), 26; social role of, (Berg-
son), 615-16

Religious: freedom (Adams), 108 ;
(Haldane), 448; ideal (Gilson),
160; liberty (Haldane), 467-68
Resistance (Bergson), 622-23
Responses (Conklin), 185-86
Restraint (Maclver), 280-83
Restraints (Bernstein), 149; (Boas),
376

Revolt against custom (Boas), 378
Revolution (Russell), 256
Revolutionary attitude (Tillich), 138
Revolutionary form of political lib-
erties (Perry), 275, 276
Ricardo (Johnson), 200
Rights (Ryan), 478-79; (Schneider),
666; political, (Salvemini), 334
Robespierre (Salvemini), 348
Role of the Court (Corwin), 101-02
Roman moralists (Beard), 295
Rossetti, D. G., (Phelps), 434
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, (Maclver),
286; (Maritain), 641; (Shot-
well), 22

Russell, Bertrand, (Brightman), 492,
500

Saint-Simon (Mann), 71-73
Samurai (Hu-Shih), 119

Samuel, Sir Herbert, (Salvemini),

338-39

Santayana, George, (Brightman) ,
500; (Phelps), 432
Science (Bridgman), 532; (Conk-
lin), 183; (Einstein), 381; (Mari-
tain), 645 ; (Millikan), 177-78
“Science of Culture Series” (Anshen) ,

Science of nature (Dewey), 364
Scientific endeavor (Einstein), 382
Scientist (Demos), 596; (Schneider),
658

Security (Adams) , 1 10 ; (Clark) ,313-
14; (Schneider), 667; (Shotwell),
1 6; of tenure (Johnson), 200-01
Self-actualization (Riezler), 550-51
Self-causation (Demos), 608
Self-determination (Croce), 39, 40;
(Demos), 597-99; (Salvemini),
333 ; (Schneider), 657, 660; (Til-
lich), 125; historical, (Tillich),
130; political, (Tillich), 125-26,
128, 130

Selfishness (Bridgman), 535-3 6
Seneca (Beard), 295
Sensation (Bridgman), 526
Sex equality (Stefansson) , 405
Sexual freedom (Haldane), 457
Shakespeare (Riezler), 544
Sidonius Apollinaris (Whitehead) , 64
Sight (Brightman), 490
Sign-controlled behavior (Morris),

583

Slave (Tillich), 125
Slavery (Conklin), 187; (Corwin),
99; (Gilson), 170

Smith, Adam, (Clark), 320;

(Dewey), 367-68; (Shotwell), 16
Smith, Sir Thomas, (Corwin), 92
Social: anarchy (Conklin), 184;
atomism (Croce), 34; democracy
(Anshen), 6; (Mann), 81; divini-
zation of the individual (Mari-
tain), 641; dynamics (Kingdon),
208; insurance (Brandeis), 352;
justice (Shotwell), 21; nexus
(Macmurray), 523; security
(Clark), 321

Social Contract (Shotwell), 22

INDEX

Social-temporal (Maritain), 649
Socialism (Clark), 313, 322, 3285
(Haldane), 4495 (Mann), 75, 76
Society (Macmurray), 518} pressure
deriving from habits, (Bergson),
612-135 relation to individual,
(Bergson), 619-21, 625
Socrates (Brightman) , 499 5 (Phelps),
4355 (Schneider), 665; (White-
head), 51

Solid core of ancient habit (Hu
Shih), 121-22

Solidification (Hu Shih), 121
Solipsism (Schneider), 659
Solon (Shotwell), 22
Sophocles (Phelps), 435
Sorel (Bernstein), 146
Sorokin, Pitirim A., (Brightman),
490-91

Sovereign national state (Kingdon),
21 1

Sovereignty (Salvemini), 344
Soviet Union (Haldane), 453, 457
Space (Birkhoff), 2255 (Brightman),
491

Spann (Maclver), 287
Sparta (Phelps) , 43 5
Spencer, Herbert, (Corwin), 1015
(Johnson), 2005 (Maclver), 281
Spengler, Oswald, (Maclver), 287
Spinoza, Benedict, (Demos), 593-94,
5985 (Haldane), 4515 (Maritain),
6385 (Schneider), 665
Spirit (Brightman), 489, 496
Spiritual (Maritain), 6495 primacy
of the, (Brightman), 499
Spiritual value (Brightman), 501
Stalin (Salvemini), 347
State, the, (Schneider), 666
Stoic doctrine of Natural Law (Cor-
win), 85

Stoicism (Corwin), 85, 865 (Rus-
sell), 2515 (Tillich), 125-26, 127
Stone Age community (Stefansson) ,
392

Stuarts, the first, (Corwin), 92
Stupidity (Russell), 258
Subjective and objective (Macmur-
ray), 5 10- 1 1

Subsistence (Montague), 577

685

Subsistent forms (Montague), 575
Substance (Demos), 607
Supremacy of reason over appetite
(Demos), 599-601
Supreme Court (Maclver), 284
Symbols (Montague), 571-73
Synthesis (Anshen), 5
“Synthetic system” (Tillich), 135

Taboos (Stefansson), 408
Tacitus (Russell), 252
Taine, Hippolyte A., (Bernstein), 146
Taoism (Russell), 261
Task of scholars and thinkers
(Croce), 27, 37

Taylor, Henry Osborn, (Whitehead),
55

Technical civilization (Tillich), 136
Tennyson, Alfred, (Conklin), 195
The Federalist (Beard), 289, 302
“The lie in the soul” (Maclver),
286

“The Omnipotent State” (Ryan), 481
“The Spectator Theory of Knowl-
edge” (Brightman), 490
Theocracy (Gilson), 164
Theoretical and practical reason
(Demos), 608-10
Thinking, art of, (Maclver), 278
Thoreau (Maclver), 2815 (Shot-
well), 22

Thought and action (Croce), 275
(Shotwell), 21

Thucydides (Whitehead), 50
Tiers etat (Mann), 68
Time (Birkhoff), 2335 (Brightman),
49U 495

Tokugawa (Hu Shih), x 18
Tolerance (Einstein), 3835 (Riez-
ler), 547-485 (Whitehead), 50
Totalitarian: regime (Dewey), 3655
state (Adams), no
Trade unions (Brandeis), 3525
(Clark), 3205 (Russell), 253
Trajan (Whitehead), 54
Transcendental obligation, law of,
(Corwin), 95

Transformation (Tillich), 135, 136
Transitions (Wertheimer), 564-65

686

INDEX

“Transnatural” aspirations of per-
sonality (Maritain), 637, 644-45,
646

Treatise on Civil Government (Cor-
win), 95-96

Treitschke (Maclver), 286-87
True and false deification of Man
(Maritain), 644-49
True and false political emancipa-
tion (Maritain), 639-44
Truth (Brightman), 493; (Gilson),
1525 (Tillich), 142} rational,
(Gilson), 1635 universal, (Gil-
son), 152, 1 65 5 (Riezler), 548-49
Tudor monarchy (Corwin), 91
Tyrannies (Salvemini), 340

Understanding- (Hu Shih), 122
Unemployment (Clark), 328
Unimpeded action (Morris), 581
Unit (Gerard), 4x4
Units (Gerard), 418-19, 421
Unity (Gilson), 162, 1653 (Riezler),
5475 of civilization (Russell),
257-585 of moral obligation
(Schneider), 66 2

Universal: democracy (Tillich), 1285
liberty (Clark), 307
University of Paris (Gilson), 159
Unrestricted sovereignty (Russell) ,
258

Utilitarian individualism (Croce), 34

Value (Brightman), 484, 488-5015
(Gerard), 426

Values (Anshen) , 4, 5 5 (Brightman) ,
5025 (Dewey), 366
Vauban (Whitehead), 59
Vauvenargues (Riezler), 539
Vergil (Whitehead), 53
Vesalius (Whitehead), 59
Violence (Brightman), 505-065
(Croce), 255 (Russell), 255
Vitry, Jacques de, (Gilson), 160
Volition (Gerard), 416-17
Voluntary: acceptance (Hu Shih),
1215 associations ( Schneider) ,
659 5 co-operation (Clark), 318

Wages (Brandeis), 3515 (Clark),
320-21 j (Millikan), 177
Walpole, Sir Robert, (Whitehead) , 44
War: and peace (Brandeis), 354-555
of 1812 (Shotwell), 16
Wartime and peacetime economies
(Clark), 316-17
Watt, James, (Whitehead), 59
Weakness of the nominalistic proce-
dure (Montague), 571-73
Wealth of Nations (Shotwell), 16
Weimar Constitution (Beard), 290.
Wesley, John, (Whitehead), 45
Wilson, Woodrow, (Adams), 1055
(Shotwell), 13

Wisdom (Whitehead), 46, 47
Witenagemot (Beard), 303
Word, meaning of, (Maclver), 279
Workers (Maritain), 643
World War (Bernstein), 148

Zeno (Birkhoff), 229